A Nerd in the Making
Coaxing a developer out of a very reluctant nineteen-year-old, and looking ahead on the path that followed
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How did I get started in tech? A good question — and despite its casual nature, a hard question. It was an accident, really. A combination of happenstance and well-directed laziness.
Three years ago I found myself barely scraping through a physics degree and hating every minute of it. Tired and unmotivated, my grades were falling, but more importantly, my hope was falling. One year in and with three to go, I saw no light on my horizon. All I saw were differential equations, linear approximations, and more hypothetical situations with rocket ships and observers and triple integrals.
I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I certainly knew what I wasn’t going to do, and I wasn’t going to do what I was doing. I called it quits and I took some time to myself to make the hard decisions that followed.
The Push
Backtrack eight months more to the beginning of the previous year. I was in the middle of Computer Science for the Sciences, a course meant to teach us aspiring science folk just enough to get by in our day to day lab lives.
Intelligent error calculations were right around the corner. This is probably the first instance of laziness serving me well. It was in laziness that I sought to automate my error calculations and so ultimately, it was in laziness that I found myself in conversation after class with Michelle Craig, senior lecturer at the University of Toronto and my professor at the time.
Michelle was smart. Michelle was kind. Michelle was patient and approachable and encouraging. Michelle was everything I could have asked for in an educator. Important also, though, was that my nineteen year old self had flagged Michelle as pretty cool. She had prestige. She played sports. She dressed alright. She carried herself well. She had a seemingly stable and rewarding home life. In every way I set out to measure it, Michelle was a successfully self-actualized adult. She had earned my respect without asking for it and I paid attention when she spoke.
“You’re really good at this,” Michelle told me. “You’re going to keep going, right?”
At the time I brushed off the question. I was in physics and I had intended to stay there, but eight months later, in the throes of existential quandary, her words would come back to me. Michelle’s played a bigger part in the path my career’s taken than she probably ever knew she would.
Another woman who contributes to this story is my mom. The taste physics had left in my mouth was so bitter that I wasn’t keen on pursuing another technical program. I was thinking of going back to Philosophy, or maybe linguistics. I was someone who, until university, had loved math, had loved school, had loved problem solving, and I was ready to throw it all away. I was home for Christmas when my mom, the gem she is, sat me down and told me that she knew I could do anything I wanted to — I just had to find something I would want to do. Together we talked it out and looked through the available options.
Computer Science it was. It was logical, it was lucrative, it suited my linear thinking, and I had already taken more than enough math for it. I was probably the most surprised out of anyone. I would go back to school full time the next semester.
The Present
Three years later I’m a full time web developer with most of a degree under my belt. I’m in the top of my class and I wake up every morning excited to go to work and do what I love.
My team is incredible, and working with people like them is part of what makes being a developer so rewarding. These people are open, friendly, helpful, and so intelligent. I’m always learning from them and I hope that at least sometimes, they’re learning from me, too. Together we make beautiful things.
That’s something else that makes being a developer so rewarding. We make things. We make things every day. When I leave work, I’ve created something that wasn’t there before I started. Maybe a feature looks different, or acts differently, or exists where there was nothing before. No matter what it is, there is an actual, tangible difference my work makes day to day and if that’s not fulfilling then I don’t know what is.
There’s never a dull moment in the field. That’s not to say there aren’t dull tasks — there certainly are — but on the whole my day to day challenges are diverse and exciting, and the opportunities for personal growth are endless. Our industry is booming and the on-job learning reflects that. There are always new tools to learn, new patterns to master, new languages to try, new standards to aspire to, and new things to be thinking about.
What I’ve found that I am the most grateful for is community. People congregate in person or online, by geography, by interest, by skill level, to teach, to learn, to share, you name it. There’s a sense of collective pride that I haven’t felt anywhere else. There’s this sense that knowledge-wise, we’re better together. Everybody wants to help everybody else achieve personal excellence. It’s something I’m proud to be a part of.
The Retrospective
There are things I know now that I wish I’d known starting out. There are things I know now that I wish I’d known earlier, too.
Firstly I wish I’d known Computer Science was an option. I wish I could go back and smack high school Natalie over the head with reality and tell her to look beyond the walls of that run down building. I wish I could go back and tell the administration it was important that, at least in some minimal way, programming be put on the table.
I wish I’d known logic was separate from math. I wish I’d known that being good at “math” — and I use that term loosely — in high school doesn’t translate to being good at math in university in any singular way. I wish I’d known there were career paths for the analytically minded that didn’t lead to hard hats or lab instruments or finance.
I wish I’d known how hard it was going to be, how hard it still is, and will continue to be— and I don’t just mean because the stakes are against me, though they are against me. I mean I wish I’d known how hard it was going to be to overcome the pernicious things I believed about myself, like where I fit in and what I could and couldn’t grow up to be and what I was supposed to be good at.
That’s a battle I’m still fighting. That’s a battle I fight every day. I am smart. I am good enough. I can do this. If it’s a problem someone else can solve, it’s a problem I can solve, too. If it’s something someone else can learn, it’s something I can learn, too. I needed to believe these things before anyone else could believe them about me.
I wish I’d known just how readily I’d be pushed towards the “girls club”.
I knew the female tech landscape was sparse. I knew I’d probably be isolated, but segregated? I didn’t expect that. PyLadies! Ladies Learning Code! Women Who Code! These groups add momentum where it was otherwise lacking, I get it, but why do I have to go to PyLadies instead of just a Python meetup? Why do I have to go to Ladies Learning Code instead of just a coding workshop? It’s not that I’m a woman who’s also a programmer; it’s that I’m a programmer who just so happens to be a woman. I resent the reverse framing.
Towards the Future
To the best of my abilities, I work to advance the discipline and the status of marginalized groups therein. Positive role models and impassioned educators have been the most important factors in my success. I strive to be both of those things. Lack of awareness and societal pressures have been the most damaging, and those are concerns I try to stomp out wherever I can.
I think these are the four most important things to focus on as a community. If we want more women in the discipline, then we need to bring more visibility to women currently working in the discipline so that the next generation has people to look up to. These figures need to be accessible, they need to be available for conversation, and they need to be excited about what they’re doing.
Importantly, these people need to be framed as successful people, not successful women. A spotlight on successful women is great, but a less exclusive and less contrived spotlight on successful people, some of whom just happen to be women, is much better. Women’s mentorship programs are great, but mentorship programs that just happens to include women and where, god forbid, a male mentee could be paired with a female mentor, are better.
We’ve made progress. Women in tech undoubtedly have more visibility in front of each other than ever before and the women-helping-women phenomenon is enjoying a well deserved reign, but when do we get to merge the boys and girls clubs? Why are we still in middle school dancing at an arm’s length from each other? When do we get people mentoring people, instead of women mentoring women? When do we get a women’s panel at a tech conference that’s given a topic other than Women in Tech? When do we get to lose these exclusionary concepts of a women’s panel and then every other panel, and start having mixed representation all over? It’s time folks.
When we’re teaching, we need to pass on this knowledge like it’s the coolest thing since sliced bread. We need to love what we’re doing, and when our students work hard, we need to love what they’re doing and celebrate their achievements with them. We need to be engaged and constantly providing feedback. We need to congratulate and encourage and inspire. Breaking stereotypes needs to start at the earliest possible point. This isn’t boring. We aren’t drones. Not all of us are neckbeard brogrammers who’ve crawled out of the bowels of 4chan to troll you for spelling Dijkstra’s name wrong or preferring whitespace languages to the {}; variety, or something.
Something also needs to happen at the high school level. Our field needs a presence in the schools, on the ground. We need teachers not just able, but willing to teach computer science courses. We need people available to lead after school programs. We need guidance departments to recognize our path as an option and communicate it to their students — to all of their students. The people who were going to find computer science on their own will continue to find computer science on their own, but if we want people we’ve never gotten, we’ll have to do things we’ve never done. They won’t find us. We need to find them.
