Thanks for writing this. As a female developer with 60K followers on Instagram, I went through all this:
– “Programmers don’t look like that!”
– “You’re fake. Some dude writes your content.”
– “Are you a model or a coder?”
Bullies are not happiest people on the planet: some of them have been harassed or bullied by their parents, in schools etc. I discovered the hard way that when I pay back with the hate, it makes me feel bad and also feeds their hate. The hardest and probably wisest solution is to respond with love to those unhappy folks. Or not responding at all. It's very hard, but it works.
While the world is on fire and in-person conferences and events are being canceled, nothing should stop a good developer from learning. For your convenience, I pulled a list of online tech events. Some of them are paid; some of them are completely free.
It took me two days to browse the internet and collect meaningful events. For now, there are 76 online events. Topics include JavaScript, Python, AI/ML, MongoDB, and more. The list is here: