Hello

I'm Gicela, a mother, web developer, tutor and engineer with many years commercial experience in web development and teaching. I love creating, developing, and tinkering. Please do get in touch if you need some help. A bit more about me.

Web Development

I built many websites over 25 years for small, medium and large businesses including Expedia, The Guardian and many start-ups.

I coded websites in vanilla HTML, CSS & JavaScript and have years of experience using WordPress

Codingbug

I set up Codingbug in 2012 to inspire the next generation of coders and makers. Since then I have been teaching after school club coding clubs for primary and seconday school children in Somerset. I have taught Python at a local secondary school. I run creative coding and AI workshops for young people. Visit the Codingbug website for more information.

Workshops

I have run numerous digital workshops for adults and young people. Here is a list of some of the workshops I have run at schools

Other Interests

I sell Mexican Silver jewellery and I love making beautiful things - especially knitting, crochet & quilting.

I also enjoy playing with electronics - stuff like Arduino, RaspberryPi, micro:bit, etc.

About me

I've been pretty much glued to a computer since my early days at school. I wrote my first code in Fortran and Pascal, before going on to complete a degree in Electronic Engineering.

Back in the mid 90's, I picked up Issue #1 of Internet magazine, and quickly enrolled onto the UK's very first electronic publishing course, which was offered in Hoxton in East London. I hand-coded my first HTML, created my first hyperlink, and learned about Photoshop, animated gifs and image maps.

In 1996 I joined the Guardian New Media Lab and built websites such as 'Shiftcontrol' (which pushed the boundaries of 'tables'), Eurosoccer.com (for the Euro 96 footie tournament), the Orange Prize for Fiction (developed only by women) and a website overnight following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales on 31 August 1997.

I helped launch Expedia UK - www.expedia.co.uk, which was then part of Microsoft. I was the program manager in a small UK team.

During the heady days of the dot com boom I was involved in all of the stages of production for a number of dot com start-ups, including e-garden.co.uk and dontforget.com. I also set up www.mexicanwave.com, which won an award from the President of Mexico and was the most frequently signposted independent website in most of the popular guidebooks, such as Lonely Planet and Rough Guides.

I now teach children coding and run workshops on creative programming. See Codingbug for more details. In 2013 I co-founded CodeHub in Bristol, a monthly meet up for coding, sharing and learning.