Crewbid is a company co-founded by friends Brian Blanco, a event promoter and Texas State University student, and Miguel Treviño. The two wanted to wanted to make it easier for people to organize social and corporate events. We spoke to Miguel recently and this is what he told us about the company. MW: What does your company do? MT: Crewbid is an online marketplace for funded social and corporate events. You can post information on Crewbid in order to receive custom packages from local venues and restaurants.… more

Olenka and Adam Polak grew up in a Polish-speaking household in Greenwich, Connecticut didn’t set out to be entrepreneurs. But an unpleasant moviegoing experience with their Polish cousins led them to create myLINGO, a company that uses pre-recorded language tracks to allow users to enjoy movies in their native tongue using their smartphones. Olenka, 21, dropped out of Harvard her junior year of college and Adam, 25, finished Johns Hopkins as a Chemical Engineer in 2012.… more

What if you could make your own commercial for the stuff you wanted to sell online? The DIME is an app created by Latinos that does exactly that. The app allows smartphone users to create their own commercials for cars, apartments, jobs, roommates, puppies, tickets or anything else you want to sell or buy online. We were lucky enough to nab an interview with Isaac Cuchilla, CEO of The DIME. The 26 year-old LA native is Nicaraguan and Salvadoran and found himself working with technology early in in elementary school; later when he became interested in journalism and worked at La Opinión, he found a way to fuse these two interests.… more

Of the many, many things that I’ve learned during my time as a Sabio Fellow, the one that stands out the most to me is how learning to code has made me a better person. Diving into a system with new rules and expectations forced me to be a lot more patient and understanding with myself — and by extension, those around me. I’ve been an “overachiever” for as long as I remember; few things have been really “hard” for me to learn and grasp. But the type of frustration I’ve experienced learning to code can only compare with how overwhelmed and hopeless I felt in fourth grade when failing to understand how to multiply and divide fractions.… more

I just won my first hackathon on an all-woman team in Los Angeles at the TechWeekLA Hackathon. That was the crown jewel of my seventh week of coding with the Sabio developer program. I couldn’t be more ecstatic. The experience was so unique because we were on an all-woman team. Given that we were a handful of women working on a projet together, and that there were literally a handful of women on the rest of the teams, it felt pretty special. Our project, Two Birds, used Google Maps and Yelp to help you get as many errands done as you needed using the most efficient route possible.… more

I’m on week five of Sabio’s .Net developer training program and while I am beginning to understand a lot about the Internet — I still have a ways to go. I do know enough, though, to be sure that you, dear reader, could probably also learn to code if you had enough “ganas” or motivation to get through the frustrating bits. Coding isn’t what I thought, but there are a few things I wish I would have known before I started. I wanted to make this video to share those thoughts, please share with anyone you know who might be learning to code and tweet me @SaraChicaD if you have questions.… more

The Internet is finally starting to make sense — and I couldn’t be more excited! I’m now four weeks into Sabio’s developer training program and I am happy to report that the gobbledygook that was once staring back at me from the computer screen is now starting to make a bit more sense. The computerspeak is finally starting to make a little bit of sense, which is exciting for me because I finally feel like I have a little bit of a base of knowledge on which to build more knowledge.… more

After two weeks of in-class prep, and months of pre-work, the start of my Sabio web developer training is this week. While I am nervous, I’m more excited, and in conversations with my fellow Sabio Fellows and professional developer friends, there are a few key things that you should keep in mind if you’re learning to code. 1.) Just start. Start something. Lots of people make up excuses for why they can’t start learning to code: they want to “make sure” they learn the “right” thing or don’t know where to start.… more

If I’ve learned anything about coding the past few weeks it’s that you have to make some very real mental adjustments to the way you approach learning. As a lifelong overachiever and typical “Type A” personality, I’m used to being able to learn new things pretty easily and with minimal effort. Recently I ran into some serious frustration with some of the advanced JavaScript classes I was taking online and felt like I’d hit a wall where I could no longer learn anything because I was so frustrated.… more

Recently I was chatting with someone about my experience learning to code and they asked me a point-blank question I think lots of us often wonder but never say out loud: “Is it hard?” I thought it was a good question, because I think we often make the assumption that it is hard before we even ask. The truth is, I told him, coding is hard, but it’s not as hard as other things I’ve already done. So even when I get discouraged, which is more often than I’d like, I remember that I’ve already succeeded at harder things than coding.… more