Q&A With BubbleSort Zines Founder Amy Wibowo
As part of our newly launched series at Femsplain, every month we’re highlighting lady “do-ers” who are making/doing amazing things. This month, we got a chance to speak to BubbleSort founder Amy Wibowo, who discussed her startup, being a Woman in Tech and learning how to code at age 8.
Tell us how the idea of BubbleSort came about!
I’ve been drawing cartoons to explain math and science for myself since high school. And I had friends tell me my explanations make perfect sense to them. It’s been a thing I’ve wanted to do for a long time. I studied computer science and I’ve been working as a software engineer for a while and craving doing creative things on the weekend. I wanted to work on something that brought my creative and technical interests together. I feel like art and technology compliment each other really well. You can make really interesting generative art with technology, and you can make complex technical explanations easier to to understand with drawings. So both things go together
Where did your passion for computer science/programming originate?
I’ve been using computers since I was very small. One summer, when I was 8 years old, I begged my parents to not send me to daycare for the summer and I’d be good and type and program. I used my dad’s “teach yourself programming” book that shows you how to write tic tac toe games, target shooting games, and other silly things. Eventually I learned about the Internet and websites and made fansites. It was funny cause we didn’t even have Internet at home, just at my dad’s office. During the weekends, my dad would drive me to his office and I would upload the HTML files onto my website.
I just knew i liked math and science. I didn’t specifically choose computer science until I realized that what i like doing most is making things, and that computer science was a way to make things with math and science.
Can you describe your experience as a woman in tech and the obstacles you’ve encountered?
A great thing about my school is that I lived in an all-female building. I didn’t really feel that tech wasn’t a place for women while I was at school.
Afterwards, I worked at a lab where I was harassed by a supervisor daily. I thought it was so unfair that the men in the lab could just focus on their work while I had to constantly fend of advances. Later on at other places, when websites went down they’d always assume it was my fault. So I would look through the code to prove it wasn’t me. It never mattered how many times I would prove it, they’d always blame me.
Most people, if you ask then “Can women be good engineers?” they’d say “sure”, but women actually have to work twice as as hard as men do to get recognized as good, and this has been shown in multiple studies.
It’s important for me to remind women that when this happens, it’s systemic and not them.
Tell us about starting BubbleSort!
I’ve been building up to it slowly without realizing it. Like making other zines during the weekends. The Airbnb graphics department has been teaching me everything about zines and binding.
I had lots of ideas about technical zines and it had been a super longtime goal of mine to make educational material to make math and science really engaging. I always put it off and thought I should wait until I’m more prepped and better at drawing. Then one day I realized I was ready, and I should just do it.
I just gave my two weeks notice at Airbnb as an engineer to focus on this full-time!
Why did you choose Kickstarter as a crowdsourcing platform?
The author of “Hello Ruby” (Linda Liukas) and I became friends and she’s been super inspirational to me. She’s been encouraging of me writing these technical educational zines. She said a statement that stuck with me. She said I’ve spent a long time working on other people’s dreams and that I should be making my dreams come true now. Kickstarter worked well for her, so since we both have similar projects, I figured it would be a good venue for BubbleSort.
Where do you hope to take BubbleSort from here?
I hope to have a longtime subscription going on, with a new topic every month. I hope to be doing workshops at local high schools. I know lots of startups hope to make tech more inclusive, so I hope that I can find some that would be willing to help and sponsor these workshops.
