Crowdsourced tech education resources

For getting into coding, and cyber security. Plus learnings from crowdsourcing on Twitter.

October 28, 2018

I’ve successfully used Twitter to crowdsource resources for people getting into tech. This post documents the results (and saves me scrolling next time someone asks), as well as learnings from the process.

Learning to code resources

I enjoy helping people learn to code, and have spent lots of time mentoring and teaching with organisations like Code First: Girls and 23 Code Street. But that means I’m often people’s first introduction to code - instead, I wanted to get an up-to-date idea of the best resources for people doing this remotely. So I turned to Twitter.

The ask:

I was impressed by the results:

A summary Tweet felt like a good way to:

  • boost reach
  • help people (including myself!) lost in all the replies
  • thank people for their responses

I’ve also seen awesome examples of others doing this, including Jessica Rose, who does this regularly and inspired me in the first place:

And more recently Charlotte Fereday who used Twitter to very quickly gain a lot of contributors to her Coder Newbie Advice GitHub Repository:

Getting into cybersecurity

Cybersecurity isn’t my expertise, but was the interest of a mentee of mine, so, again, I turned to Twitter.

The ask:

The response was fantastic: 120 replies, many detailed and thoughtful, some direct offers of support/conference tickets from senior industry people, and a notable subset who had assumed I was the 17 year old girl 💁.

I didn’t post a summary Tweet this time as the results were hugely diverse, and sometimes contradictory so I’d recommend working your way through them if cybersecurity’s your thing.

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