On Thursday 7th December, Ladies of Code Glasgow celebrated Christmas with our tradition (2 years makes a tradition, right?) of mulled wine and coding.
About 25 ladies from the Glasgow development community came along to our meetup at Glasgow University Computing Science building to have our own version of a Christmas night.
We started off with quick presentations to introduce our projects, we had 4 volunteers:
Carole Logan (Me!): Alexa Advent calendar skill. I gave a quick intro to main concepts in Alexa skills: intents, slots, utterances followed by a run through of the code.
Cat Hawker showed us A-frame, a HTML based VR framework! This is awesome for me as a web developer as at least there is less to learn to get started. Here is Cat's demo and source code.
Demo: https://vr-christmas-card.glitch.me
Source: https://glitch.com/edit/#!/vr-christmas-card
Alison Aird worked her Arduino magic and showed us some Christmas lights she made. I always joke Alison is like a code Mary Poppins as she has a magic bag full of any electronics you might ever need!
Here's a link to Alison's slides on the Arduino Christmas lights: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1JMJUO7sWoksNIs_2cY_yln73S2NGskoK33GJy58SpYQ/edit?usp=sharing
And a link to an online tutorial on programming the lights: https://randomnerdtutorials.com/guide-for-ws2812b-addressable-rgb-led-strip-with-arduino/
Jeremy Signer our host from the School of Computing Science showed us a fun project with Micro: Bit. He networked them all to talk to each other and places them in clear Christmas baubles. When you move of of them, they all light up! So fun!
After our presentations we all let people have a look at which project they like and would like to know more about as well as a chance to mingle. I really like this part of our Ladies of Code meetups, getting to know what kind of coding each person does and how they got in to tech.
Our meetup has grown so much in 2017, our first full year! I hope we are even bigger in 2018 and make it to another Christmas meetup with even more ladies of code...and of course mulled wine, mince pies and more hacks!
Thanks to our speakers, sponsors and attendees this year. Have a lovely Christmas and we'll see you next year!