For years Bridge School community organizers, staff, and other volunteers have put in thousands of hours of work to build an organization that focusses on positive direct impact for women, agender, and non-binary workers in tech. We did good work together, and saw incredible results. We came far in a short period of time, but unfortunately as of this week we will be pausing our operations indefinitely.

Like many community-built organizations, burnout was common among our ranks long before the pandemic, but it ran through our community rapidly and at all levels once the pandemic hit. We even wrote about a lack of sustainability and its impact on the mental and physical health of those in the organization back in 2018. We made a commitment to ourselves and the community at that time, but we didn’t uphold it. Here’s a screenshot from that 2018 post:

Over the years, we’ve prided ourselves on holding Bridge’s programming and operations to the absolute highest standard. Students, volunteers, and corporate sponsors all saw the results of this thoughtfulness and hard work in our curriculum and delivery and we were all collectively thrilled to see Bridge succeed.

But for the organizing team behind the scenes, the incessant long nights, constant uncertainty, days spent workshopping and brainstorming, the back to back pitches and exploratory chats, the endless curriculum rewrites, the inevitable missteps and wrong directions and all the other difficulties running a small but ambitious non-profit seemed mandatory to push through. With every success, we set the bar higher, never stopping.

Even as we started to see our team individually succumb to (and yet still push through) terrible physical effects of this work we still thought, “someone has to do it”. In our desire to give as much as we could as often as we could, we entered the pandemic “running on empty”, and everyone reading this knows the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing stress and anxiety on everyday life. The combination has shown us that we cannot risk the physical and mental health of even one Bridge organizer any longer.

So, while this is goodbye for now, we hope to see Bridge’s inspiring community of volunteers and alumni stay connected, and wherever we can we will give everything we’ve learned to them. Bridge has always been community built and community defined. To that end, we’ll continue to provide a space for our community to connect, meet up online, share, offer and ask for help when needed, and we’ll provide them with all of our (already open source) content to use however they find useful. We’ve already seen our graduates go on to lead and serve as inspirations to many others and we look forward to helping them where we can as we wind down operations.

For now, you can read what we had planned to do in 2020–2023, and watch this short video that explains Bridge’s model and reason for being, in the hopes that perhaps it will inspire others to give, sustainably, where they can in the future.

Thank you so much to all of our alumni, volunteers, supporters, partners, friends and family who got us through to today. We’ll always have what we built together.

— the Bridge team

As has been in the works for quite some time, I have decided to step down as CEO of Bridge School, effective by the end of June 2020. I will be working with the Board during that time to ensure a smooth transition, including ensuring our short-term commitments to better serve the Black community are completed and our medium and long-term ones are solidly on track before I leave.

Over the years of building and leading Bridge with a community of well over 200 volunteers, I have had the incredible privilege of seeing what is possible when passionate, empathetic people come together united under the singular goal of making the world better for those who come after them. To have worked with this group of selfless people to take Bridge from non-existence into where it is today will stand as a highlight of my career. Certainly the highlight of my life.

Bridge has grown quickly in complexity, offerings, and purpose. It has grown in importance and impact. It has grown in community. This is the type of growth the technology industry needs more of. Bridge provides an outlet for some of the industry’s most dedicated, caring people to share their craft and their support with those who have demonstrated an immense ability to learn and to overcome. I am so lucky to have known even one of them, let alone such a number.

As the organization moves forward, our three-year Strategic Plan, our mission, vision, and values, and the people at the core of those values will carry forward and continue Bridge’s incredible impact in our community. After a Board-led search, the Board of Directors will provide oversight and strategic guidance to a new CEO who will take my place to serve our ever-growing community. Our students and alumni will continue to thrive as tech workers, advocates for social change, and support systems for one another. Bridge has the potential to go on to become one of the most impactful non-profits in the country. And I have every faith that the community around it will get it there.

I will be taking some time off to ensure I can return to the tech industry that I love with a full heart and energy to spare. I will then continue to dedicate what I do to helping technology workers however I can. I greatly look forward to what is next for me. Even more so what is next for Bridge, and more than that still what is next for the people I have been lucky enough to see rise through Bridge to become a new cohort of leaders who will change this industry from the inside out. To them: you are truly limitless in potential. Thank you for letting me be a part of your future.

— Emily Porta

In those early days, Avery, Abdella Ali, Yuri Takhteyev and I worked so hard to found Bridge. As the project grew, my communication with Avery began to break down, and this was my fault. I didn’t keep her up to date. I should have reached out to her. I should have talked to her. But I didn’t. It was a failure of my early leadership.

When Bridge moved from a Rangle project to incorporate as a non-profit, we needed to clarify current leadership roles. I asked Avery to update her title to reflect her current involvement in the new, non-profit organization. We wanted our community to understand who was an active volunteer or staff member so they could ask questions about Bridge, and we could answer appropriately.

I didn’t communicate this request well. Not as a co-founder of Bridge, a friend, nor as the organization’s CEO. And Avery was hurt. By me, a white woman afforded many privileges which are amplified within tech leadership, who did not see or appreciate the full extent of the harm I caused to Avery. I sincerely apologize.

I have reached out to Avery to apologize personally.

— Emily Porta, CEO, Bridge School

What We’re Doing

Bridge puts our community first. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of our immediate measures:

• The leadership team is focusing on diversifying the Board of Directors, and the Executive team itself. We will ensure this is high priority. We will be immediately adding two seats to the Board for student/alumni representation and will be actively seeking a woman, agender, or non-binary person of colour for these roles, so that community representation is at our highest level of decision-making going forward.
• We are hosting a community video chat this week with our executive team where we will be answering all questions the community has in an open format.

From this experience, I learned about the unspoken, hidden dynamics of a white woman in a leadership position.

When the group that originated Bridge came together and started working, the last thing on my mind was who was doing what. And in principle that seems fine — now I know that it isn’t, because those who are further marginalized in our society and in the technology industry have had to constantly deal with being sidelined. It’s not enough to “treat everyone the same”, of course. I thought I knew that. But I didn’t put it into practice with Avery, and I absolutely should have. I will do better at this going forward.

Committing to Black Lives

As protests continue supporting black lives in America and around the world, we encourage all other organizations to take this moment to reflect on what they are putting into practice for the black community and other equity-seeking groups. Here is a list of what we’re doing so far:

• We have donated funds locally to Black Lives Matter Toronto and Justice for Regis, and will continue to monitor and assess groups to donate to that are providing on the ground support for the Canadian and American black communities.
• A key area of focus in our Strategic Report, completed earlier this year, already focuses on further reaching out, engagement with, and help to the BIPoC and non-binary communities specifically, and we will follow through with that as planned.
• We have a Code of Conduct that we will review and update to more explicitly demonstrate support for black folks in tech as well as all equity-seeking groups.
• We are reaching out to anti-racist training organizations this week to provide training for our community and our leadership (and taking on any costs associated with that training).

Committing to Equity

What is the organization’s official position on equity? For hiring, for programs, for board recruitment?

Equity is one of our core values, and always has been. For our student applicants we have always had many individual processes in place to help ensure diversity, and we will be examining where we can improve for hiring and board recruitment. We will be reaching out to a Board diversity specialist to ensure all best practices are followed and not grow the board without the added representatives being people of colour. We will take action on all of these points by the end of the summer and report back to the public.
In addition:

• All programming events will have a requirement to maintain a diverse representation of speakers.
• We will pay all speakers we invite to talk to the community.

How do issues related to equity and inclusivity show up informally?

Everything Bridge does centres around inclusivity and equity, it’s our mission and vision. While we work to get this right, sometimes we fall short. And we learn from these moments, not just the surface level lessons but the deeper ones. We acknowledge the role leadership plays in fostering a feeling of inclusion and equity, and we believe the best way to ensure proactive work is done is to ensure the diversity of the very people providing our services, both the volunteers and our staff.

If someone has an issue or complaint, what is the official process for them to be heard?

The current process is to contact one of the staff or leadership team that they feel most comfortable in contacting. We will now be instituting a way to anonymously provide feedback to the executive and a clear process on following up with that feedback and reporting that to the community as a whole (unless the person includes they do not want the followup shared).

What has the Bridge community been up to?

When it became clear that due to the COVID-19 pandemic we would have to pause our regular in-person programs, the first question we asked ourselves was ‘What does the community need right now?’. We felt strongly that whatever we did, we wanted to be able to offer something of distinct value and provide learning to our students, alumni, and volunteers.

We brainstormed, talked with some key volunteers, and quickly generated a list. We had ideas for workshops, talks, and suggestions for events that we could run virtually and went to work planning.

At this point, we weren’t sure how often folks would want to attend an extra-curricular something (if at all!), how many people would volunteer and really what would even happen. As we like to, we decided to experiment and adapt to whatever we could learn. We’ve had an overwhelmingly enthusiastic response from both volunteers willing to offer their time and with the community signing up to attend.

So far we’ve been able to offer something every week and currently have plans in the works for events through to the end of June!

Here’s what we’ve done!

So, what have we done? We started simple and had a Zoom social and show-and-tell. We wanted to focus on bringing the community together, without pressure to “do more”, during a very difficult time in all of our lives. We got to see some faces from the Bridge alumni community we hadn’t seen in a while and talk about what the upcoming plans were for Bridge and see demos and shares of everything from new websites, new companies and even knitting. Keep an eye on our social media where we’ll be sharing some community profiles of these and other awesome Bridge people!

Since that week we’ve largely focussed on learning events, mostly either a specific technical topic or something related to career momentum. We’ve been able to share content such as how to succeed in technical tests, how to interview authentically while fully remote, and some general good for everybody to know learning with a personal financial workshop.

We’ve had talks on unit testing in Jest & React, an intro to Gatsby and coming up soon we’ll be exploring Security concerns in front-end development, SQL and intro to DevOps, and API design. We’re also working on expanding our ability to offer this amazing content to the broader community of women, non-binary, and agender developers and designers. We’re also starting to record a series of Bridge Talks videos, chats and interviews with interesting folks in the tech industry.

We know that online workshops and talks aren’t everybody’s thing and so we’ve also created a few new Slack channels in our busy Bridge community. In one we post a question each week that you might encounter during an interview and have people discuss their thoughts or solutions. Another is intended just to meet new friends. Using the Donut Slackbot we introduce new to each other folks weekly and they have a virtual coffee chat. Some old friends have even set up chats when paired and specifically shared something they knew they hadn’t shared much about before, deepening these ties. Not surprisingly, for the Bridge community who are always looking to improve their interview skills, the interview prep channel has generated a lot of discussion and enthusiasm.

From the outset of the pandemic, we’ve had great support from all of our sponsor companies, many of whom are joining us to offer talks and workshops. Thanks also to our long-time community supporter Greg Wilson, we’ve been able to offer a four-week professional workshop to our instructors and mentors on how to become even better teachers.

That’s where we’re at right now and while we look forward to being able to offer our regular deep-dive learning programs again someday, we can’t deny that we are having a bit of fun connecting with the wonderful folks in the Bridge community in these new ways each week to learn and be social together. Online.

Programming in a pandemic was originally published in itsbridgeschool on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

With this in mind, the best place to start was to create a strategic plan. With the help of Monica Chohan, an experienced facilitator and strategic planning professional, the executive team focused on creating a plan that would guide the organization for the next three years. As part of this work, we adopted a new vision statement that reflects our commitment to systemic change in the tech community. We’re currently working on creating a shareable version of our 2020–2023 Strategic Report that we expect to be able to release soon.

Out of our strategic planning sessions we identified that we wanted to focus on developing our fundraising capacity. We’ve had wonderful support from our existing partners, and we wanted to ensure that those partners were getting the most from us, and that we could build on that momentum. We hired The Good Partnership, who specializes in helping small nonprofits grow their fundraising. Since starting work with the Good Partnership, we’ve developed a scalable menu for partnership and developed processes to increase our ability to provide value to our partners while continuing to provide support to our community. In the last year, we’ve received funding from five new partners and renewed two existing partnerships. With the help of The Good Partnership, we are also building out a three year fundraising plan that will help us grow Bridge as an organization as well as help us deliver on our strategic mandate.

“Bridge has an exceptional community and we’ve seen people and companies really step up to support this important work. We know this foundational work will set Bridge up for continued growth and impact.”

~Cindy Wagman, President and CEO, The Good Partnership

Lastly, we wanted to utilize the grant to get clarity on how to promote Bridge and we needed to make sure that that aligned with the strategic roadmap we laid out. Most pressing was to take a look at all the data we’d collected from our student surveys to see what impact we were having on our community. We were thrilled to see that approximately 76% of Bridge graduates were getting new jobs upon graduation. This was just one of the key findings that you can see in our 2019–2020 Impact Report. As part of this project, we spent time defining what the Bridge style branding looked like and sounded like, ultimately producing the new Bridge School Brand Guidelines. As we move forward into the second year of our grant, we’re working away on a Marketing and Communication strategy as well as a super cool video that answers the question “What is Bridge?”.

This grant allowed us to spend some money on publicity and promotion. The Bridge team makes it a priority to get involved with community events. In order to support this we needed some swag to help spread our vision. We produced a marketing one-sheet and purchased Bridge t-shirts and stickers for the students to help enhance that community feeling of belonging.

We set out with the intention to build Bridge’s capacity as much as possible with this grant, and in our first year we have accomplished so much! We’re looking forward to the next three years where we can put into action even more of our capacity building plans, resulting in a greatly increased ability to provide value and support to our partner organizations and the community that we serve. We can’t wait to share more of our journey with you.

Making the Most of our Women and Gender Equality Canada Grant was originally published in itsbridgeschool on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The findings were a result of a survey conducted between August 19, 2019–February 18, 2020 to understand the impact of Bridge’s programs on students and graduates. Through this survey, Bridge was able to learn more about the results of our programs and understand ways the team can adapt and improve our services to grow and widen our reach. The Impact Report also provides a clear narrative for outcome-focused funders to see how their contributions are making a difference.

We were thrilled to see some key results, including 76.8% of students go on to get new jobs once graduating from Bridge. One big reason for these results is that our programs include more than just training. In addition to providing advanced technical and design training, the culture at Bridge seeks to instill confidence in all students. Through 1:1 mentorship, welcoming instructors, and opportunities to showcase their learning and leadership throughout the course, Bridge is successfully helping our students become tomorrow’s tech leaders. We want every student to feel comfortable growing and advocating for themselves as tech workers, and we were thrilled to see our hard work in this area has paid off. Students rated their confidence levels after attending Bridge an average of 4.2 on a 5 point scale.

Overall, our commitment to support inclusive workplace practices and improve the career advancement of women, agender, and non-binary tech workers remains at the forefront of all we do, and the Impact Report findings confirm that our mission and program results align.

“Bridge School has accomplished more than we thought possible over the last four years, and our organization could not have achieved our goals or impacted so many tech workers without our incredible community”
~ Emily Porta, Bridge’s Founder and Chief Executive Officer.

To learn more about our community involvement and the top skills learned, employment results, and overall satisfaction levels of the students at Bridge, click the link below and read the full report.

https://bit.ly/2020_Bridge_Impact_Report

If you’re an organization looking to champion diversity and inclusion initiatives, contact Bridge School today to learn more about our corporate partnership opportunities: sponsorship@bridgeschool.io.

We wanted to take a moment to thank our amazing volunteers and freelance artists that worked with us to create this report. We would not have been able to collect and present this meaningful data without their efforts. Thank you Lindsie Canton, Justina Choi, Mariam Ayyoob, Barbara Kowalski and Amanda Foust.

Bridge School’s Impact Report is Here! was originally published in itsbridgeschool on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Bridge’s commitment is to provide free, advanced education to women, non-binary and agender tech workers. This mission will now hit a new level of impact thanks to PagerDuty’s partnership and commitment to equitable communities.

As one of Bridge’s earliest sponsors, PagerDuty’s growing partnership with Bridge will allow for an even greater impact on the tech community as the non-profit works to provide increasingly more advanced training programs. The funding from the partnership allows Bridge to conduct their first back-end cohort — an 11-week advanced training program for students who have been working as developers for 2+ years and are looking to become full-stack or backend developers. The current lack of opportunity for women, agender, and non-binary developers to experience applications at scale holds these developers back from more intermediate and senior positions. Bridge’s programming aims to fast-track promising developers into these more advanced positions.

“PagerDuty, through internal programs that include our Employee Resource Groups and our philanthropic arm PagerDuty.org, is passionately committed to supporting our local communities. This means actively creating pathways to opportunity for underserved people from diverse backgrounds. We feel strongly the Bridge School’s mandate is deeply aligned with our own cultural values, which is why we’re excited for this partnership.”
~ Dileshni Jayasinghe, Sr. Engineering Manager, PagerDuty

PagerDuty is a platform that helps companies of all sizes proactively manage their digital operations so their teams can spend less time reacting to incidents and more time building for the future. PagerDuty’s technical excellence, communication, teamwork, and their alignment with Bridge’s mission for equity, inclusivity and quality education make them a standout partner.

This partnership is a meaningful example of how Bridge is working with tech companies to hire and retain diverse talent — to build a more equitable and inclusive tech culture.

“The whole Bridge team is thrilled to be partnering with PagerDuty to bring our first Backend program to life.” ~Emily Porta, CEO, Bridge

“When we thought of companies in the Toronto tech community to partner with on the new cohort, PagerDuty was at the top of the list — not simply because of their excellent technical alignment with the program, but also because of their uniquely inclusive culture. We knew PagerDuty would be a true partner throughout the cohort, bringing immense value to our students. All of our partners bring both technical strength and a commitment to fostering an inclusive company culture to the table, and we’re proud to continue that momentum with PagerDuty’s team” said Emily.

Bridge School is working to build a better future in tech for Toronto and the surrounding areas. If you’re a company looking to participate in or even lead diversity and inclusion initiatives, contact Bridge School today to learn more about our partnerships: hello@bridgeschool.io.

PagerDuty and Bridge Introduce First Free Backend Development Program was originally published in itsbridgeschool on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Written by Purvi Kanal.

Over the past 3 years, as a team we’ve reviewed over 1000 applications to our frontend development program and after wrapping up the 9th round I decided I want to share some learnings about applications to our frontend program. What I wanted to focus on is the folks who don’t end up getting into our program or receiving our technical test, why that is and what they can do to keep learning to get there.

Every time we open applications and inevitably have to say no to folks, I always think to myself that I want to reach out to the person whose application I’m reviewing and say something specific about how they are on the right track and with a few months more practice, they will be an ideal Bridge candidate. While I can’t reach out to all applicants individually, this post will aim to be the next best thing.

Below, I’ll point you towards the best online resources, almost all free, that you can use to guide your own learning. We receive applications from folks at all different points in their learning journey, so I’ve broken down some advice into the most common scenarios we’ve come across over the years. However, you may fall into an intersection of these categories. Also, note that some of the resources mentioned below are Toronto specific, so if you’re reading from elsewhere there are location-independent resources and likely similar organizations in your community.

I’m New to Web Development

Welcome! You’ve decided you want to try and pursue a career in web development and are looking for a safe place to get started with A+ resources. While Bridge is for folks who typically have been using JavaScript consistently for anywhere between 6 months and 2 years, there are lots of great resources available for you to take your first step.

Canada Learning Code has some really great hands-on workshops for folks looking to get started, we would recommend checking out their introduction to HTML & CSS and their introduction to JavaScript workshops, you can find information about their offerings here.

You can also begin your self guided learning online through freeCodeCamp and Codecademy. They both have free offerings of introduction to JavaScript, HTML and CSS courses. Working through these on your own is a great way to get started along with finding and attending any local workshops you are able to. Generally speaking, you can find local workshops on Meetup.com and you might want to get on Twitter if you haven’t already and start following local developers.

I’ve Started to Teach Myself Web Development

You’ve completed a couple of online courses yourself and/or attended some introductory workshops on HTML, CSS & JavaScript. That’s great! You’re probably wondering how you can focus your learning more so that you can start building things that are a bit bigger. Now is a great time to start thinking about learning ES6 and getting comfortable with it by building a website(you can try this for yourself by creating a personal website).

Here are some modern JavaScript resources, some of these options are free and some aren’t but are moderately priced:

• JavaScript 30 (30 day accountability challenge)
• ES6 for Everyone (Course by Wes Bos $)
• Exploring ES6 (Free HTML Book)
• Accelerated ES6 Javascript (Udemy Course $)
• Learning ECMAScript 6 (Lynda Course $)
• Introduction to ES6+ (Screencast)
• Javascript ES6 Cheatsheet (YouTube)

It’s also important to keep practicing your programming, here are some places where you can practice what you’ve learned so far:

• ES6 Katas
• Code Wars

As you get more comfortable with JavaScript, you can dive deeper with some more advanced courses and look into learning one of the more popular frameworks — we’d suggest React.

I’m in a Web Development Bootcamp

We really do believe in in-person hands on training and that’s exactly what bootcamps are for. Take advantage of being in the classroom and the expertise of your teachers and mentors while you are there, take the time to get to know and network with your peers. Work through assignments and projects together and get as much collaborative experience as you possibly can. You’ll likely come out of your bootcamp with a few projects that involve jQuery, React and maybe some Node or Ruby on Rails. It’s a lot of information to consume in a few short weeks especially if it’s the first time you’re seeing all of it. I’d recommend working at things on your own outside of your bootcamp curriculum if you have the time to and do a deep dive into JavaScript and React.

Since you’ll be pretty busy with things during your bootcamp, here are some reading and video resources that would prove helpful:

• React Documentation (Seriously! The docs are great, beginner friendly and involve tutorials)
• React for Beginners (Course by Wes Bos $)
• Learn ReactJS (Course on Codecademy)
• Intro to React (Course on freeCodeCamp)

I’ve Used JavaScript to Build a Few Projects

You might have recently completed a bootcamp, or maybe taught yourself through online resources or built a few wordpress sites. That’s awesome, and this is the time to start deepening that knowledge through practice! To build on the knowledge you’ve acquired here’s a few things I’d recommend:

If you’ve built a project with React, or any webpage, learn how to put it on the internet yourself. This might seem like obvious advice, but there’s a lot that goes into taking a project from localhost to hosted on a domain. Check out Netlify for easy and quick static site deployments, it's also totally free.

After you’re comfortable working with a framework like React and have built a couple of smaller projects, try to think of a larger project you can build to keep practicing your JavaScript skills. This should be a project that incorporates some data that you fetch from an API with typical features that a web app would have like logging in, displaying a gallery with multiple pages of data, accessibility features, forms, lazy loading images etc. You can find a list of good APIs to work with here. If you can’t come up with an idea of what to build for practice, try building a product that already exists in a read only format like GitHub or Reddit. Both of these products have APIs that are available to use.

The ideal way to practice writing code is by getting paid to do it. If you’re looking for a job focused on web development, it can be hard to get your foot in the door without prior experience, but right now the priority is to get your foot in that door. It may not be the ideal gig writing React apps every day but if you can get paid to write code everyday, this is one of the best options. You’ll still likely have to supplement your learning once you have that job (and this is where Bridge comes in!), but it’s a great start.

Another way to further your coding practice is with others. Communities are vital to keep you motivated and accountable so we highly recommend finding one! You can do this by going to meetups, local hack nights, workshops or even over the internet through platforms like Glitch.

We acknowledge that being able to attend things in off hours isn’t a solution for everyone and there are definitely other ways to keep up with coding and the community. The tech community is consistently producing blog posts and content that you can consume and this is a great way to keep up to date with your tech stack of choice. Some blogs we recommend checking out:

• The Practical Dev
• freeCodeCamp
• Hacker Noon
• CSS-Tricks

Also think about writing your own blog posts about the things you are currently learning, or your learning journey overall and the tools you’re using to practice web development regularly. The value of posts written by folks who are learning is huge, so don’t underestimate it. You’ll likely be helping someone in your position a few months down the line. It’s also a great way to cement your own understanding of topics and creating a platform for yourself in your community.

There are also some really useful podcasts out there, they’re a great way of learning especially if you have limited spare time. Some of our favourites:

• Full Stack Radio
• Front End Happy Hour
• CodeNewbie
• Command Line Heroes

I’m Comfortable with JavaScript and Received the Bridge Technical Test

If you’ve received the Bridge technical test in the past, chances are you’re quite comfortable with JavaScript and potentially even using it on a daily basis. A great option here is to dive deeper into how to use JavaScript in a modern way to do complex data transformations. Here are some resources for ES6, JavaScript and functional programming patterns:

• Javascript ES6 Cheatsheet
• Fun Fun Functions YouTube Channel
• Further Adventures of the Event Loop
• Modern React with Redux

On top of the specific technical skills, we’re also looking for your code to be readable. Simple code over complex one liners, clearly commented code, descriptive function and variable names are examples of things that we look for while marking technical tests. Go over your past Bridge technical tests and ask yourself whether your code is readable, refactor it to be more clear and readable.

I Have Other Programming Experience That Isn’t JavaScript

We see applications from folks who have programming experience in other areas for example with R, Python or MatLab for scientific programming, C/C++, Java and other backend technologies that are looking to learn web development. If you fall into this category, you probably have a lot of the base programming skills down and need to focus on really learning and applying JavaScript. Have a look at our first section “I’ve started to teach myself web development”, those resources can help you get familiar with JavaScript syntax. The next step would be to become familiar with the JavaScript runtime, this tends to be a huge difference since JavaScript is single threaded. Here are some more advanced JavaScript resources for when you have the syntax down:

• JavaScript: The Good Parts
• Further Adventures of the Event Loop

I’m Getting Back into Programming After Leaving Development for a Few Years

Welcome back! Tech stacks change every year so it can definitely be daunting re-entering programming and wondering what skills to brush up on. If you happened to be a web developer earlier on, JavaScript has changed so much that it may feel like learning it all over again. If you’re already comfortable with JavaScript, make it a priority to become familiar with ES6/7 and all the new language features. We have links to these in the section “I’ve started to teach myself web development”. Once you’re comfortable with those, you can start looking into a front-end framework like React. We have links to resources for this the “I’m in a web development bootcamp” section.

If you’re re-entering programming and aren’t familiar with JavaScript, check out the section just above this that outlines how to get up to speed with JavaScript if you have other programming experience.

Closing Thoughts

Learning programming in a non-traditional way is tough, and even if you do have a traditional education most universities don’t have a web development course that is up to date so there’s a lot of learning to be done yourself. You might fall under one, many, or partially all of these categories — we know that there are many paths and learning isn’t linear. Take from this advice and list of resources what is the most relevant to you where you are at right now. Keep at it, keep learning, and we hope to see your application to Bridge for frontend development soon.

Written by Purvi Kanal.

Follow us on twitter, linkedin, or facebook for all announcements about upcoming cohorts in our frontend, backend, and product design streams.

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Bridge was named a recipient alongside a number of other organizations that are aimed at enabling women’s and Indigenous organizations that serve women to tackle systemic barriers that impede progress. The national representation of the recipients demonstrates and recognizes the diverse experiences of gender and inequality across the country; Bridge will continue to operate and serve the tech community in Toronto as part of this grant.

“Our need to grow and meet the demand for our graduates is rising and we’re grateful for this long-term funding from the Government of Canada,” says Bridge founder and CEO Emily Porta. “It provides the resources we need to improve our graduates’ economic security and the tech industry’s labour requirements while advancing gender equality — this is transformative change at its best.”

As women continue to be disproportionately affected by economic insecurity, often earning less for every dollar earned by men, and who are also much more likely to work on a part-time basis, Bridge School is aiming to assist women, non-binary and agender tech professionals in Toronto to level up their skill set to improve their careers, and in turn, their economic security.

Bridge School is honoured to be among the 18 organizations in Toronto receiving funding on behalf of the Honourable Maryam Monsef, Minister of International Development and Minister for Women and Gender Equality.

Read the full press release from the Government of Canada here.

Bridge School Awarded Grant to Build Capacity in Toronto’s Tech Industry was originally published in itsbridgeschool on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As part of our commitment to help level up junior and intermediate women, agender and non-binary professionals in tech, we’ve been offering a series of Professional Development Sessions for our alumni. We had the honour of kicking off 2019 with Karen Kua, who talked to our grads about their job search.

By day, Karen helps to build teams for enterprise organizations and startups entrenched in Big Data, Machine Learning, Risk, and more. By night, she develops with a MERN tech stack and is an education guru. She also mentors and does program management at IT non-profit organizations.

She gave us so much wonderful information, that it was impossible to write a short post. So, get your coffee and enjoy your reading!

1. Working with recruiters

Internal recruiters vs External recruiters

• Internal recruiters only hire in their own company, and for their own company’s roles.
• External recruiters (aka agencies/vendors) work with many different clients, placing professionals in other companies.

External recruiter benefits:

• They sometimes work on roles that are not published.
• They sometimes work on contract roles that are given to external recruiters only.
• They can give you detailed insight into the role and quicker feedback, such as interview tips, format of interviews, and advice to perform better.
• They will notify you about multiple roles across different companies that suit your skillset.

Always:

• Assess the recruiters you work with, ensuring they are responsive and trustworthy.
• Get as many details as you can: client name, location, job description, job ID, information about the team, the project, etc. Anything you feel you’ll need to make a decision.
• Keep in mind that recruiters have quotas to meet, so some recruiters work to collect resume submissions regardless of the candidates’ suitability for the role. These are the types of recruiters to avoid.

✨ Hot Tip ✨ The job ID is a unique identifier for the position. It is important to know it, so you do not duplicate your application. If you apply for the same job with different recruiters, the hiring managers may not move forward with you to avoid possible conflicts.

Never:

• Never give out a RTR (right to represent) statement before speaking with the recruiter about the role. The RTR provides the recruitment firm you give it to the exclusive right to your application for a particular role. Be careful! Read the RTR in detail, ensuring it does not include any clauses that may affect your applications for other roles.
• Never forget to ask about their payroll process. In some cases, there might a delay in your first payment when you become a contractor under the recruitment firm. More on contracts below.
• Never apply for the same job on the client’s website if you’ve already applied through a recruitment firm. As mentioned above, if the hiring team receives a duplicate application from you, they may not move forward.

2. Optimizing your Resume and LinkedIn

ATS-Friendly Resumes:

Hiring managers receive thousands of resumes for the roles they work on. It is not possible to read all of them, so it’s important to submit Applicant Tracking System (ATS)-friendly resumes. When you have ATS-friendly resumes, they’ll be processed with higher accuracy when they’re submitted to these platforms. For example, your contact details, experience, tech stack and so forth will be more accurately parsed. Therefore, when hiring managers query their ATS platforms for resumes matching particular keywords/parameters, your resume will have a higher chance of appearing in the search results if its data has been parsed accurately. ATS-friendly resume templates don’t look as stylish, but they ensure a higher chance that your resume will appear in their talent pipelines.

✨ Hot Tip✨ To learn more about ATS-friendly resumes and to build your own, check this out this great tool.

LinkedIn:

• Keep your LinkedIn updated.
• Your status should be Open to New Opportunities.
• Put your email and other contact details in your description/summary at the top, above your work experience.
• Include technologies you’ve worked with in your position descriptions.
• Fill out your list of Skills at the bottom.

✨ Hot Tip ✨ When there’s a request to connect, check if there’s a message attached. Many recruiters use this resource; it’s free, compared to sending you a direct message called an InMail.

When a recruiter reaches you out via InMail, try to avoid clicking a button labeled “Not interested”. That will close the channel completely, and they will not be able to send you a message again unless they purchase another InMail message. Just reply to them and keep the channel open as they may present you suitable employment opportunities for you in the future.

3. Salary and benefits

• If you’re asked about your current income, it’s your choice to answer or not. You can give a range you’re comfortable with.
• Try to put yourself in the middle of the range, to keep yourself competitive. It is less likely for the client to pick you if you’re closer to the ceiling. However, ensure you’re comfortable with the numbers at all times.
• Always ask for $5–10k more than what you want to leave room for negotiation. It’s common to have your number negotiated down by this much.
• You should also consider other add-ons in the compensation package, such as vacation time, team culture, RRSP plans, equity, bonuses, education funds, etc.

4. Seniority

If it is your first job in the field, you are a junior. But avoid using the word “junior” as much as possible.

• Usually, the seniority is defined based on performance + years of experience. But it can be flexible. If you were great in the interview, you can be considered for a higher position, even if you have less experience.
• Do not predefine yourself!

5. Interviews and whiteboarding

• Be prepared for 3–4 rounds of interviews (even for junior-intermediate roles).
• Take home tech coding challenges can take a few hours to 1 week to complete based on what’s been assigned.
• Don’t panic if you make a mistake during whiteboarding and/or the technical verbal questions — the interviewers want to see how you catch mistakes, deal with failure and stress, and troubleshoot mistakes. Maintain a calm composure at all times and be open-minded to their feedback.
• Maintain your calm during the interview process: try reframing the way you see your interviewers. Think of your discussion with the interviewers as another discussion with fellow team members and developers — have fun and show your authentic self!
• Practice whiteboarding / technical questions on your own or with friends to build your confidence.

✨ Hot Tip ✨ Some websites and apps can help you enhance your technical interview skills, such as LeetCode and Pramp.

6. Finally, here are the top 3 questions to ask in an interview:

• If they haven’t described the team culture, ask them about it.
• What they describe as the traits of a successful hire. This can be valuable information to help you upsell yourself in the next round of interviews.
• What are the next steps?

Thank You!

A huge thank you to Karen for sharing such amazing and valuable tips; and to Executive Director Emily Porta, Bridge in general, and Rangle.io for hosting!

Also, big thanks to Bridge alumni Rose Wan for taking notes during the event, Stephanie Zeng for helping with the room, and to all Bridge alumni for sending questions for the Q&A and for attending the event!

Tips for your job search from a recruitment insider was originally published in itsbridgeschool on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.