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Finding My True Creative Purpose Through the Revolution of Women Who Barely Have the Right to Exist

Reaching an epiphany through code and creativity.

By Mynah MariePublished 3 years ago 21 min read
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Finding My True Creative Purpose Through the Revolution of Women Who Barely Have the Right to Exist
Photo by mostafa meraji on Unsplash

I was pacing back and forth the same few blocks on the main street of a small town for the last ten minutes. Most people I was crossing were staring at me with perplexed looks on their faces — I could sense they were not used to see a foreigner visiting this part of the country.

“Hey, I’m here but I can’t seem to find the classroom… Can you come out to get me?”

“Sure, one second I’ll be right there.”

I waved at my friend Shireen as I saw her step out onto the street. “I’m a bit nervous…” I told her. “Nah, don’t be. The women are really sweet, you’ll love them.”

Following my friend, I stepped inside a small house with two main rooms. The entrance faced a small kitchen corner, just big enough to hold a sink, a mini-fridge, few shelves with cups, tea, and coffee, a kettle, and an electric plate for rudimentary cooking. On the left was a living room with a large table for meetings, as well as a few couches and a coffee table.

Connected to the living room with glass doors was a modern-style classroom, with long wooden tables fixed to the walls, plenty of electrical outlets so everyone could connect their laptops, and a big-screen TV towering over the room.

I looked at Shireen and smiled.

“This is so cool!” I said.

“I know, right? Wish we had something like that when we were studying at the Bootcamp! This is way better than our classroom in Nazareth.”

We both giggled while reminiscing the good old days — which were not so old, only two years prior — spent in the uncomfortable and crammed classroom of the NCTA (Nazareth Cultural and Tourism Association) and dealing with the unpleasant man in charge of the place.

I met Shireen in 2017 while doing the Founders and Coders Full Stack Coding Bootcamp in Nazareth, Israel. While I was a student, she was our course facilitator. I was 35-years-old at the time and she was in her mid-twenties, but we got along amazingly well despite our age difference and quickly became friends.

I went to the kitchenette and made myself some coffee. One of the women, my future student, was washing up a few dishes and gave me a shy smile, which I returned.

As I walked into the classroom, cup of coffee in hand, I took a moment to absorb the scene before me while Shireen was explaining who I was in Arabic in her typical enthusiastic tone. A group of fifteen religious Druze women, all wearing a black “dress” and white "headscarves" (unfortunately, I don't remember the proper name for these pieces of religious clothing), were staring at me with a mix of curiosity, excitement, and fear.

“How will I ever be able to remember their names?”, I thought. Their religious clothes covering their bodies and most of their faces and hair made them seem almost identical to one another.

“Mynah doesn’t speak Hebrew or Arabic, so it will force you to improve your English.”

Voices of protest arose within the group. I didn’t understand what they were saying but I’m guessing it went along the lines of “we can’t do this”, “this is too hard”, “I don’t speak English well enough”, etc, etc…

We expected this to happen.

I calmly introduced myself, taking care of speaking slowly and using the easiest words I could think of. I explained the program is meant to be in English because that’s the language of the high-tech industry. I reassured them by saying it will become easier with time, and that I’ll do my best to speak slowly and with simple words. Then, I said how happy I was to be here, and how excited I was to share my passion for computer programming and web development with them.

Photo by the author — My group of Druze women working in the classroom

From musician to programmer

My journey to becoming a programmer, trained web developer, and coding mentor started in 2016. Before that, I’d been a traveling musician for all my adult life, classically trained in University until I left my hometown of Montreal, Canada, at 21.

Through my work with music, I traveled the world and discovered new places, people, and cultures. Nothing about my reality was stable, and my work took me through periods when I struggled to eat as well as times where I slept in 5-star hotels. The diversity of these experiences mixed with my passion for music kept it alive and interesting for nearly fifteen years.

Overall, I had the kind of lifestyle most people only dream about, but the more time went by, the more I felt something was missing.

I grew tired of always playing other people’s music and I longed to be recognized as an artist. At the same time, putting together a band was unrealistic because of the unstable nature of my lifestyle. Every time I traveled to a new country, it meant finding new people to play with and starting again from scratch.

That’s why, at some point, I turned to technology to develop myself musically. I started to experiment with the idea of replacing band members with machines and software to create my show. I bought a loop station and fell in love with its endless possibilities. I became increasingly curious about how machines like my loop station or my computer worked. How were these amazing tools created? What kind of knowledge did someone need to build something like this?

One day, after some intense Googling, I signed up for my first online programming course on Edx. It was an introduction to computer science course given at Harvard and the teacher was incredible — I felt my brain explode. From that moment on, I became obsessed with learning how to program.

It was a time in my life when I was looking for something more, a way to contribute to society beyond working in the entertainment industry. I wanted to develop practical skills that could be useful to others in a more tangible way than what art and creative expression can provide.

I thought of leaving my music career behind and finding myself a job as a programmer. Coding felt like a superpower because it seemed like I could build anything — things that people could use, things that could make a difference. I just needed to have the knowledge to do it and the internet was full of information for me to tap into.

Even though my ambitions had changed, I still wanted to create music and perform as a hobby. I thought it would be great to have a job in something I’m also passionate about that could give me the financial freedom to play exactly the music I want, when, and where I want. So I set myself the goal of finding a job as a programmer and pursue music on the side.

After only a few weeks of coding, I became curious to figure out how I could integrate my love for programming with my passion for music. “I wonder if it would be possible to code music”, I thought. I asked Google again, not expecting to receive any answer to such a weird question but lord and behold, there it was. The first entry on Google was “Sonic Pi — The Coding Synth For Everyone”.

From there, everything changed.

Sonic Pi is an application that allows you to use a programming language, Ruby, to create music with code in real-time. This method of coding creatively as a performing medium is called live coding.

I started learning how to code music with Sonic Pi while taking more online programming courses. I released my first song created with it in 2017 under the name "Earth to Abigail", right before joining the coding Bootcamp in Nazareth. The song is called "Paradise" and the lyrics talk about how my ambitions changed and how I became a "new person" after discovering technology.

But at that moment, live coding was still new for me and I treated it as a hobby while staying focused on my goal of finding a job in the tech industry.

Fast forward two years later, here I was with Shireen in that classroom with fifteen pairs of terrified eyes staring at me.

A few months prior, she had sent me an intriguing text message on WhatsApp with the promising opening line “I have a job for you!” The rest of her message explained the job would be to teach web development to a group of fifteen religious Druze women in a small town not very far from Haifa.

The goal was to teach them the Founders and Coders curriculum, the same one I had done myself—a professional and intensive four months full stack web development Bootcamp. I already had some experience mentoring and managing a classroom. After completing the Bootcamp in Nazareth, I took on Shireen’s job as course facilitator while she transitioned to work with another nonprofit organization focused on helping Israeli Arabs find employment.

That company had recently partnered with two Druze women determined to launch a new coding Bootcamp to help other religious women from their community become web developers. They knew that many tech companies were ready to hire developers to work remotely. This aspect was very attractive to them since their religion forbids them to leave their village without their husbands or a male family member.

I had no experience dealing with religious people and I’m far from being a religious person myself. On top of that, I knew nothing about the Druze culture—their beliefs, traditions, ethics—and no idea if I could successfully integrate such a group with so many heavy differences in our cultural backgrounds.

But Shireen knew I love experiences out of the ordinary and that I’m ready to put my heart and soul into work if it’s for a good cause.

Uncovering unexpected challenges and reaching an epiphany

Over the next six months, I devoted my life to teaching everything I knew about programming and web development to these women. Most of them barely had a decent level of education — only a few had gone to university until they got married and started a family within the constraints of their religion. The English language was an issue for many, but with patience and time, they slowly got over their fear of judgment and became better at expressing themselves in a foreign language.

The other challenges we faced were more complicated.

Individual and critical thinking turned out to be massively challenging concepts for them. They had never learned that it’s ok to have an opinion of their own. Because of their culture, they weren't used to have their opinions heard. They didn’t know how to think for themselves, much less figure out a solution to a problem. They needed someone to constantly tell them what was right and what was wrong.

They expected to learn the correct answers to everything, write them down, and then learn all the answers by heart. I had to explain multiple times that programming was not always about right or wrong answers, it’s about finding a solution to a problem. I had to get them used to the idea that there isn’t always a pre-made answer, sometimes you need to figure out the answer for yourself in relation to the problem you’re trying to solve with your code. To do that, you need to think outside of the box.

Not an easy point to get across.

This was amplified by the fact that the social pressure was immense. People came to visit the classroom as if these women were zoo animals — from politicians to employers, to rich people looking for a good cause to donate their money, we often had to work under the eyes of eager strangers, happy to be witnessing a historical event: the revolution of women who barely had the right to exist beyond their purpose as wives and mothers.

They lacked the confidence they needed in order to learn. A few of them gave up, most of them broke down multiple times in the classroom. A few times a week, I had to give group pep talks just to get them through another day.

I soon realized that teamwork was a bad idea. They had a tendency to rely on one team member to do the work, the one they considered the "smartest", while the others just stood back in fear of doing mistakes. So I prioritized individual work instead.

I struggled to get them to find their own unique answers to problems because they lacked the confidence and self-esteem needed to just try something. Their fear of failure was through the roof. Since beginner-level coding exercises are pretty much always the same, it’s easy to find ready-made solutions on the internet. Copy pasting and plagiarism quickly became an issue. They were ready to do anything if it meant not having to bear the humiliation of having failed, or to avoid being perceived as inadequate.

I explained to them time and time again that programming is creative. That creativity allows you to think outside of the box to resolve an issue. That building something like an application is a creative process.

So many times, I wished I could just ditch the curriculum and work on coding fundamentals with Sonic Pi instead.

There are many reasons why I wished I could’ve taught them programming through music with Sonic Pi. Music gives you instant feedback on what you create. Music is unique, there’s no cheating by looking up code snippets on Google. Music is subjective, it’s not about a right or wrong answer. And music is a low-pressure activity, it’s not asking you to build something people will rely on. Music gives you a safe environment to make mistakes and gives you the chance to practice problem-solving skills on a small scale.

But I couldn’t use Sonic Pi because we had a curriculum to follow, and that curriculum was dictated by the employers in the industry who were eagerly waiting to hire these women.

After six months of intense struggle, they were finally ready to apply for jobs. Most of them got hired as junior devs at companies like Amdocs and Microsoft, which, considering where we started, was truly an accomplishment.

Photo by the author — The plaque the women gave me at the end of the Bootcamp, one of the best gifts I ever received.

On my side, I moved on to become more serious with Earth to Abigail.

The whole experience had shown me that the high-tech industry definitely had its flaws and I wasn’t sure I wanted to contribute to it anymore.

It pained me that I had to teach these women using methods I saw as outdated. It pained me to compromise the nurturing of passion and creativity for the sake of shoving a curriculum down their throats imposed by future employers. It pained me to see how creativity wasn’t acknowledged as a valuable skill simply because it’s associated with artistic expression and therefore, not something serious, just something to have fun with.

For all these reasons, I shifted my focus and put together my Earth to Abigail website, started writing a blog with articles on humanities, creative coding, and Sonic Pi tutorials, and began performing in venues across Israel.

From time to time, when I needed some extra income, I continued to mentor in the coding Bootcamps Shireen was managing.

One day, a few months before the pandemic, I was on a field trip with a cohort of students. We’d been invited to visit the headquarters of the company Oracle in Tel Aviv.

That day, I had an epiphany.

Sitting in a conference room, we were listening to the HR manager speak about how to present and behave during an interview. She lectured the students on signs in someone’s body language that inspire confidence and help an interviewer consider you for a second interview.

During the Q&A, a student asked:

“What if I never practiced to look someone in the eye and make eye contact? What if I don’t feel confident at all? Should I just pretend and try to ‘fake it’? Or should I stay authentic to myself?”

“It’s better to fake it”, the HR manager said.

His question broke my heart. I remembered the Druze women and their struggles with self-confidence and self-esteem. I also remembered myself at a younger age and how I struggled with self-confidence for a long time. I was always naturally introverted, and to this day I struggle with paralyzing social anxiety from time to time.

The difference is that I’m now able to navigate these issues comfortably, without them being an obstacle to my success or my career. I realized that the problem these women had were not all caused by their religious backgrounds. The cultural constraints aggravated them for sure, but low self-esteem and low self-confidence are something many people trying to enter the tech industry struggle with.

Most people attracted to programming enjoy spending time alone. To really dive into coding, you need to be comfortable spending hours in front of your computer. So it’s no surprise that programming can attract people who naturally have a tough time adapting to social situations.

Programming gives you a superpower: the one of being able to bend a machine to your will and create tools modern society depends on. This, in itself, is an incredible skill to boost your self-confidence and self-esteem.

But when you want to enter the workforce and make a serious living with your skills, it’s impossible to escape people. We need to make a good impression. We need to work in teams and communicate effectively. We need to be stand up for ourselves and establish healthy boundaries with our co-workers. All these things require great people skills.

Unfortunately, I met so many talented young programmers not succeeding to find a job in the industry simply because of their lack of soft skills.

This brought me to ask myself: how did I overcome these challenges? How come I can walk into a job interview and look confidently at the interviewer? That’s when it hit me: the advantage I had was my experience as an artist and performer.

Performing on stage taught me to own my space and believe in myself. It taught me to communicate with people, face my fears, and go beyond my limits. It taught me how to create a connection with people quickly, even with strangers, by practicing empathy and by feeling the room. It taught me to open up while respecting my integrity.

When we think about it, performing on stage on an amateur level is a low-stake environment: no one will die or be badly affected because a musician messes up. No one will lose their jobs or miss out on the opportunity of a lifetime because of a poor show.

Is an important interview really the time someone wants to be practicing social skills they’re not comfortable with? Better to use a stage, where the pressure is on but the stakes are low, as a practice platform.

On the way back from Oracle, I took the bus with another student. I asked him what he thought of the day and if he’d be interested in applying for a job there. To my surprise, he was quite unenthusiastic.

He explained to me he fell in love with programming as a kid by having fun with his friends creating some basic games. As a teenager, he created a cool plug-in for a game he loved and made some money out of it by selling it to friends and gamers.

“Now that I’m on the job market,” he said, “it seems like everything revolves around what I need to know to get hired. I need to convince people that I’m good enough for the job. I need to pay attention to how I speak and how I present in job interviews. People are advising me to take the time to compare each company’s benefits and salaries before accepting an offer.”

“I went into programming because it was fun, creative, and gave me a sense of purpose. Now, I don’t feel the fun side so much anymore… I only feel the pressure of the industry and the focus on money.”

With these words, I suddenly put two and two together.

My mission would be to help others learn to program more efficiently by giving workshops and creating courses that put forward the tools and processes I’ve benefited from my whole life: creativity and artistic performance.

Combining performing with a creative practice is the ultimate complementary superpower to programming. Why? Because creativity develops out-of-the-box thinking. Creativity builds problem-solving skills. Creativity always encourages you to find your own way of doing things, which is a wonderful foundation for becoming a great learner. Alongside all this, performing teaches you all the soft skills necessary to thrive in a professional environment.

All these skills are crucial to become an effective and successful programmer.

Reality shifts caused by the pandemic

When the pandemic hit, my work as a performer and mentor came to a brutal halt. Thankfully, I received an incredible amount of support from Sonic Pi’s creator himself, Sam Aaron.

While live performances were paused everywhere, the live coding community was thriving. More and more online events started to happen. Since live coders are techies, and since our performances are based on the audience staring at our screen while we are writing code, we had no problem transitioning to this new online reality.

Sam recommended me to various tech conferences that were looking for live coders to diversify their lineup of talks. Thanks to him, I got my first well-paid live coding gigs and started building up the "Earth to Abigail" name.

Since I had more time, I sharpened my marketing skills. I became a trained copywriter and found work as a freelance writer. While artists around me were struggling, I did my best to pass on general marketing knowledge to artists I knew and helped some of them develop a business plan to grow their artistic business online.

In the meantime, I also gave more and more live coding workshops through Zoom. People were looking for things to do during the lockdown and live coding seemed like something fun to learn or at least try out once. I gave many workshops for free, just to introduce people to Sonic Pi and to live coding in general.

As the year progressed, I received invitations by tech conferences to talk about my creative process with code and why I think live coding could have a social impact beyond simply creating art.

Post-pandemic adjustments to the initial dream

Now, we are already almost mid-way into 2021. While I’m still in Israel at the moment, my time here is ending, mostly because of my working visa expiring. Soon, I’ll travel to Portugal, where my parents now live. Unfortunately, this means the small community I built here will struggle to continue since there isn’t currently anyone else teaching Sonic Pi in Israel.

At the same time, we all became very comfortable with remote work and remote learning. There’s no reason to tie these things to location anymore.

That’s why I’m pursuing the creation of this live coding and creative coding community online. I already wrote e-books that walk people through programming fundamentals using Sonic Pi and I’m creating courses as we speak, based on the various recordings of past workshops I already have. My students in Israel are ready to join, along with students learning with me through Zoom for a few months now.

I’m expanding my dream of creating a new model of learning through live coding. I'm planning to host online events to give community members the chance to put their skills to the test. Combined with the online courses and the access to a private Discord server where I’m available to answer questions and support people, and bi-weekly live workshops and focus groups, we can create a thriving community of dedicated learners and creative coders.

Of course, there will be challenges. One of them is educating people on the fact that creativity has benefits beyond simply expressing ourselves and having fun. Understanding the connection between programming and creativity is still not very intuitive for many. But as we progress and accumulate success stories, I’m confident this will become easier.

Another challenge is making this community available for minorities and people living in 3rd world countries. Most people tell me I underprice my workshops, but the truth is, I’m charging what people can afford in the country they live in.

For example, I have a dedicated student attending my online workshops who lives in Argentina. There’s no way he could afford my workshops if I charged $30 or $40 per session like many people are recommending me to do. These prices are affordable for someone in the U.S. or Europe but it’s completely unrealistic for people in many other countries. I’d like to adjust the price of the memberships depending on the economy of the country new members live in.

The goal of this community is to learn valuable programming skills through creativity and performing arts. Some might want to move on to study professional engineering programs afterward, others might want to pursue a career in creative coding, others might just use it as a fun and constructive hobby.

At the end of the day, the aim is to nurture and promote a passion for technology and science through creative expression while building solid social skills through performing. I’m taking this to the next level. Who’s ready to join me?

By Katrina Wright on Unsplash

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About the Creator

Mynah Marie

Musician, programmer, live coder, and writer. They/Them.

www.earthtoabigail.com

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