The Powerpuff Girls
An Unexpected Journey into Computer Science
The new White House initiative to support CS education made me think a lot about how I started in this field. I recently heard about Cartoon Network introducing coding into shows, so I wanted to share my story.
When I was 7 years old, my dad would pick me up from school and take me back to work with him. My dad worked at Autodesk, where he had a cubicle with a chair and table for me in one corner. I was told to stay quiet and mostly out of his way while he worked. Clearly, there’s another Medium article to be written here about affordable after-school care, working parents, etc., but this isn’t about that.
I typically played online games, usually on funschool.com (which sadly, no longer exists). My dad set me up on this website, showed me the basics, and got back to his work. When he saw me playing “Memory” (a game involving remembering hidden cards and sorting them into matches) for the 1000000th time, he pointed me towards a tutorial on HTML. I don’t know if he thought about it too much, but I was bored and he wanted to challenge me.
A day later, I built a website. It wasn’t anything like those iPhone apps that 7 year olds make now: I didn’t get a million downloads, I didn’t become the primary breadwinner of the family, I didn’t get any news articles written about my fantastic website. I don’t even think it was hosted online.
I made a website devoted to The Powerpuff Girls. In retrospect, there’s probably some deeper connection between a young girl starting out in tech being inspired by strong, crime-fighting girls who were raised by a scientist father. Though, if I’m being perfectly honest, I’m inclined to say that I did this mostly because I watched a lot of TV as a kid (and still do, thanks Netflix). I learned how to use <img> tags, write text inside of <p> tags, and even got fancy with some <h*> in there. It wasn’t a great website, but it had all the details you ever needed to know about Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup.
A lot of people have asked me how I got into tech. Well, this is it.
My parents gave me the freedom to explore what I wanted to do, while helping me when I needed it. When I told my parents I wanted to be a professional soccer player, they signed me up for soccer camp and only complained a little when I scotch-taped pictures of Mia Hamm all over my room. When I told my parents I wanted to be an astronaut, they took me to see the launch of Spaceship One in the Mojave desert. When I told my parents I wanted to go to MIT, they bought me a very heavy winter coat and my first UGG boots. Those have really come in handy these past five years.
Just like the Powerpuff Girls, I think I try to be a mixture of “sugar, spice, and everything nice” most of the time. But I guess I got a little bit of “Chemical X” thrown in there too — I like to think of coding as my superpower.