My awesome friend Monica and I recently organized the first edition of Montreal All-Girl Hack Night. We kept going to programmer meetups in Montreal and being upset there was usually at most one other woman there. So we decided to try to find out if there are actually women who program out there. (spoiler: yes)

In point form:

• 25 or so women came.
• Turns out there are definitely tons of women who program and do all kinds of different things and are fantastic. I was surprised and delighted by the amount of amazing people who showed up.
• Languages women program in: C, Python, PHP, Ruby, ActionScript, Java (sometimes specifically for Android), R, C++, Scala, …
• People I met had jobs doing: web frontend stuff, teaching, web backend stuff (in Java, in PHP), machine learning, journalism, game development, coding for banks, bioinformatics, and more things that I have forgotten
• Notman house let us use the space for free, and people there helped us move tables around, clean up afterwards, and were generally amazing.
• Not too much actual hacking went on – some people interested in Python claimed the couches, and there were people talking about Android and getting someone’s Android app installed on their phone in a corner. Some people wanted ideas for projects that they could work on, so may come up with some. More hacking next time!
• Also turns out that Twitter is actually an effective way to advertise. May start using Twitter.
• Github pages is the easiest way to set up a website I’ve tried so far.
• Also you can make a pull request on the website! (repository)
• Budget breakdown: domain name $5, snacks $35, beer $30, plastic cups $5.

There’s going to be another one in January. YEAH.