On this year’s Girls’ Day 2023, we explored the question: What does it mean to be a hacker? Hackers are people who know a lot about technology and computers. They can program and know how computer systems work. They use this knowledge to find new and clever technical solutions to various problems.
A hacker once said, “A hacker is someone who tries to figure out a way to make toast with a coffee machine.” That’s silly, of course. But it shows that hacking is both a technical and a creative activity.
On https://hackerinnen.space/de, female hackers introduce themselves and tell how they got into hacking and what it means to them.
Of course, you don’t become a hacker in a day. But computer programming is one of the most important tools of the trade. That’s why we participated in Girls’ Day 2023 and got to know our dream colleagues of the future. We spent a day hacking with children between the ages of 10 and 12. For this, we used the programming language “Python”, which we at IndiScale also use in many of our projects and software products, e.g. in our research data management system LinkAhead.
The participants also took part in our team meetings and got an insight into our everyday life at IndiScale – and learned why we need hackers for this.
Girls’ Day 2023 was the second Girls’ Day hosted by IndiScale. It is part of our company’s vision to promote the next generation of IT professionals, to create a gender-equal working environment and to generally increase diversity in the IT world. We have set this outin our Gender Equality Plan as well. We see Girls’ Day as a way to support these goals in the long term – and to have fun in the process.
The feedback from participants and parents confirms this. We are therefore already looking forward to the next Girls’ Day!