Jacqueline Sloves: Turning Ideas Into Reality Through Code and Creativity

Jacqueline Sloves began her career in coding after working as a Customer Success Manager for BrightBytes, an education-technology company based in San Francisco, CA. There she realized that no matter how much work needed to be accomplished by the team, it was always bottle necked by the capacity of the company’s engineers. Recognizing this inherent limitation, she decided that she wanted to be part of the solution, and learn the skills necessary to turn concepts into reality herself.

After completing her Peace Corps service in Ukraine, she returned home and started looking for programs that could help her achieve that goal. It was then that she discovered Women Who Code. There she found a place where she could attend free coding classes, get help from experts in the field, and find inspiration from other female professionals that had successfully made similar career transitions. She was particularly fond of the Javascript study group, where she developed both a proficiency in and appreciation for that particular language.

Next she enrolled in the Coder Camps program in Houston over the summer of 2014. That honed her skills to an even higher level, and she did so well that the organization asked her to help expand the program, tasking her with the goal of opening an office in the Bay Area and serving as the Program Director for it. This was the greatest challenge of her life, but it was also a dream come true, as it gave her the opportunity to not only apply her new knowledge, but also to share it with others in order to give them a chance at greater social and economic mobility.

She spent six months laying the groundwork for the new branch of the organization; building the office, developing the program, and ensuring that everything was in place to start educating students in the art of code. Then in January of 2015 the doors of the Bay Area Coder Camp opened, and the first classes were held. Since then she has had incredible success, constantly expanding while also training many eager minds in the skills needed to excel in technology careers.

Jacqueline continues to act as the program director for her local branch of the organization, a position which consists of handling outreach with local groups, curriculum development, hiring, and management of day to day operations. This is something she describes as her “dream job” and according to her, “The most rewarding part is to see people go through our program, conquer the initial hurdles of learning to code, graduate with confidence, and then begin their career as a software engineer.”