Mobile App Development
Based on an episode with Melisa Márquez Rodriguez 🇪🇨
Welcome to Latinx in Power, a podcast aiming to help to demystify tech, the way we do that is by interviewing Latinx and Caribbean leaders all over the world to hear their perspective and insights.
We talked with Melisa Márquez Rodriguez (she/her) is a highly accomplished Software Engineer Manager with a passion for mobile app development and community engagement. With years of experience in the tech industry, Melisa has established herself as a leading expert in her field. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering and works as a Senior Software Engineer at Cash App.
Melisa’s hard work and dedication have not gone unnoticed. In fact, she was recently featured on the prestigious BBC list of 100 inspirational and innovative women, a testament to her outstanding contributions to the tech industry and beyond.
In this episode, Melisa provided valuable insights into the world of mobile app development and showcased the importance of community involvement and work-life balance.
Subscribe to Latinx in Power!
Apple | Google | Spotify | TuneIn | Stitcher | Deezer | PocketCasts
What does it mean to be a Latina for you?
I guess for me, I was born and raised in Puerto Rico, so for me, being Latina is that there’s this underlying set of cultural experiences that unites a lot of Latin America. Our shared heritage, our common struggles, our similar language. For me, it’s always mind-blowing when I meet someone from any of the 30 countries plus from Latin America, and it’s like we are able to quickly find common ground.
I think another thing for me that is very Latina for me is music. I come from Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico is known for a lot of important artists that have pushed Spanish music, especially across the globe. For me, that there’s our history from back in 500 years ago when people meet on the fires to dance and meet and plan their new things to getting us through the current hurricanes and earthquakes that happen in Mexico and Puerto Rico, I think that magic, that we are able to be together under one shared heritage, even if we are all from different countries is very, very powerful for me. I’ve been to multiple parts of the world and every so often there’s like one song, but at least one song comes out. And it’s like, “I know these people,” which is very exciting.
Can you tell us about your background and how you became a software engineer, manager, and specialized in mobile apps?
I guess there’s two parts to this. There’s the, how do I become an engineer and how do I become a manager, because these are two parts of my personality myself, and I’ve managed to combine them into being an engineering manager.
How I got into technology, it’s not a super happy story. When I was 12, I got hit by a hotel bus and I was out for a year, and I couldn’t go to school for like six or seven months. And this was like the early 2000s. This was before iPhones, before social media, now we’re glued to these technologies. Back then, a computer was this fancy thing. And for me, I always had this aching question of like, “How does this magical device come from electricity?” And that was my big goal.
During high school, I studied on Saturdays. I took a lot of extra classes to try to get myself to the school of engineering in the University of Puerto Rico. I eventually got there and I studied computer engineering. The manager is part leadership. The school was very far away from me. When I moved to the University of Puerto Rico I didn’t know how to make friends. I didn’t know anyone. Everyone was very far away. The way I solved that problem was, I started volunteering, and I volunteered in a lot of student organizations, IEEE, I was part of this in government. I was all over the place. And that kind of connects back to how I got into mobile and I currently live in the Bay Area.
Back in 2010, I was the president for the IEEE Computer Society, the student chapter back in Puerto Rico, and we wanted to show students new technologies. That was our big audacious goal for the year. It was like, “What can we show people that the professors cannot?” And so we contacted Google, we said, “Hey Google, can you help us with this project?” And we created the Android Development Challenge. This is a very similar one that existed at that time. We kind of organized throughout the entire university and we had a bunch of people building their first Android apps. This was like before the major apps. People were building things like a Coin Flipper and things like that. That’s how I personally got into mobile.
As the organizer, I’m always a believer of like, I need to know something about that specific item. I learned Android that way. I kept working on Android until I graduated in 2014. At some point, my friend was, “Hey, you’re very good at this Android thing. You should apply to Silicon Valley.” I applied to a bunch of different companies, and I got very lucky with this company called Weebly. They flew me over and offered me to join and I became their lead Android developer for a while.
I was in charge of their app and I grew with that app, eventually taking all that leadership experience I had from college plus my skill set and became the organic leader of the team. Helping the community has always been important to me and I’m part of multiple communities and I try to serve them as much as I can.
How do you balance your professional career with your community work and personal life?
I’m not the greatest at this, I admit it. Some people say that I am working even when I’m not working. A lot of some of the volunteers sometimes feel like a job. With COVID-19, I made it a priority. I was forced to sit down and be in my house and we were in lockdown for a bit. I learned how to have better boundaries, better balances around that thing. I think for me, the biggest help I’ve always done is to create a system for most things. I am a believer that consistent repetition doesn’t allow you to get stuff easier, like just learning a skill or even in your own house. It’s like if you wash the dishes every day, you don’t have to worry about it at the end of the week.
The basic things, there are things in this life that you need to do. You need to sleep, you need to cook, you need to shower, you need to do these things. So as much as I can make them easy and reliable, that’s usually kind of my best work. And, yeah, just setting some boundaries around saying no. I have a big problem with saying yes, all the time. I’ve just learned over the years as I grow older to just say no or ask myself where my time is or what is my priority. Is it my current personal project? Is it the friends and family? Does it work? And kind of like being very conscious of how I divide my time around these things.
I’m not going to pretend that I don’t feel guilty, even as you get older and get better, sometimes I do feel it. It’s like guilt and I have to remind myself, “This is okay,” or just talk to someone. I feel sometimes when I get into my own brain, you feel super guilty. Sometimes I have friends and family that’s like, “You said be straight. Can you tell me that I did this correctly?” And so, they helped me out in that way.
Rest is definitely important. I worked with a sleep coach once. And she was like, “You should sleep, you should relax, you should do these kinds of things.” Also, at some point, you burn out if you take too much. And I’m not perfect. I’ve burned out many times in my lifetime. With experience, I’ve learned that I need a rest. I can’t do everything. There’s such a thing as volunteer burnout.
There’s such a thing as wanting to do too much of a good thing. It’s important to take breaks because the type of community work that I do are things that they’re not going to change overnight. One hour that you’re resting versus one hour of working is not going to make a big impact in the long term. And the same applies to work. Sometimes productive, focused work is better than pushing yourself the same work across 10 hours.
How do you see the future of mobile app development and how do you see it evolving in the coming years?
I think the concept of a pocket computer is here to stay. The phone is not going away in the sense we’re always going to have some computer close to you. The real question becomes, what does that look like? I think the future is twofold. One is like, the hardware will shrink, the hardware will become smaller, the hardware will essentially do more stuff. Is it VR? A lot of crazy ideas out there, but we are in that process. I think that’s very important to keep in mind.
And the second is AI. I don’t think AI will take over all of our jobs immediately. That’s not feasible the way artificial intelligence works. You need a lot of computers. A lot of people think about it like the movies, and it’s like, we’re not there yet. Google and these companies have tons and tons, and tons of servers to just run a basic question. So we’re not there yet. But I think these two things are just going to change how we perceive mobile development in the future.
The biggest thing you can do as a developer, as an engineer, is just to stay nimble and accept that you’re going to grow and things are going to change. I always love talking to people that have been here for 30-plus years. They develop apps for CDs. What they tell me is, “Hey, I started developing CDs, now I’m doing mobile apps.” I think as long as you have strong fundamentals and you’re willing to evolve what you’re working on, you can still keep yourself relevant in the industry.
It’s good that people keep up, but also remember that media and YouTube and social media amplifies everything. It’s important to remember that this is true. Also, how much do you really need to know about this topic? Are you going to be an AI specialist or do you just need to work with AI? Those are two very different things.
Checking your sources and being critical about the information you receive, we also get information so fast that we don’t sit down at a time to process this. I think that’s something we kind of miss. I mean, I’m not that old, but like in the 90s when we were young, this wasn’t a thing. The news would come on a paper, you would have to check sources, you would hear around people. I feel people don’t do that anymore. They just quickly assume everything. I read once that it’s because it’s easier to publish now than before. Like before getting a book, getting into a newspaper was a much harder endeavor. And nowadays, anyone can do it. And so, the onus is on us to figure out what is it and what is it not. I think that also comes from how do we improve our education, society, how do we teach the next generation how to be critical about these things and not take it at face value?
Who has been the biggest influence on your life and career?
I always say it’s very cliche, but it’s my parents. My parents and I were from Fajardo, Puerto Rico. Even within the context of Puerto Rico, we are a very tiny town that we’re on the coast, and not a lot happens there. They both have inspired me in very different ways. It kind of shows up. My father, he’s a teacher. He’s a physical education teacher and he’s a sports coach. I’ll be very frank, I don’t love to follow sports, but he taught me a lot of lessons using sports as a medium.
I always remember him complaining to his high school basketball students. They were pretending to be the NBA, but they couldn’t shoot a basic ball. He was very angry at them because it’s like, “You don’t even know how to shoot the ball and you’re pretending to be Kobe Bryant.” That’s a lesson I’ve taken forever. It’s like, learn the fundamentals of wherever you need to know. You don’t need to be an expert in everything. You just need to know enough about the basics and you can have a conversation with people around it. But you don’t need to be like a super in-depth personality.
Whenever I am doing something new, I apply that. It’s like, “What are the very basic things I need to know so I can be effective at this?” I think the other part from sports that I’ve kind of learned is a community and helping other people out. I saw how my dad, he was a community leader. He helped other folks. He helped students get out of trouble by just being them and providing them a ball to shoot. That’s one aspect for my dad.
Then from my mom, my mom is a very smart, aspirational woman that she had me when she was 19. I saw her grow, I grew and saw her how she would get her master’s degree, how she worked tirelessly to fight gender stereotypes, how to be more professional. I saw how she climbed the ladder within Puerto Rico as a whole. She taught me a lot of things. How should I behave? Who are the right people to talk to? Where should I focus? And she’s been even to this day, a great mentor that I call up to her and be like, “Hey, what do you think about this situation? Can you help me?”
I say I’m a mix of both. I’m pragmatic and local and volunteer for my dad and then very ambitious and want to keep climbing for my mom, and sometimes they’re in conflict, but sometimes I make it work for both sides.
Which advice would you give to someone interested in pursuing a career in mobile app development?
It goes back to that fundamental idea. I would say pick one, Android, iOS. Try to learn from it and try to learn the basics of computing that will give you a better understanding of things in the long term. What I mean by that is, at some point, I hate the notion when people say, “Oh, you know multiple programming languages, that means you know a lot.” It’s like, yes, but at the same time, after many years, patterns start to repeat. I think it’s more important for people to know the patterns and the way these things manifest, rather than, “I need to know everything under the sun.”
The other advice I give to people is choose the right tool for what you want to do. If you want to be a game developer, maybe not learning Android or iOS is the right tool. If you want to be an Apple developer, yeah, learning iOS and Swift is like the right call.
Honestly, engineering is just taking all these tools and fixing a problem for someone more than just the pure programming aspects. I think especially nowadays we kind of glamorize just programming and it’s like, programming is cool, but I fixed this problem. I helped provide fact tax services for free in Cash App. And that’s something I’m very proud of so always be curious, start to see the patterns, always ask why this works. There’s always people who are willing to explain. And at some point with growth, you’ll start to see that it repeats. The cycle repeats after a few years.
I come from an old school of engineering in Puerto Rico. Computer science is not as evolved, but there’s a lot of civil, there’s a lot of mechanical engineers. I always take the example of a bridge. It’s like when you’re building a bridge, the bridge can’t fall. I try to apply similar principles when I’m developing software. What’s the goal? What do they want? How can I make this as easy, as simple for them to use without them feeling they need to understand a manual to get this working on?
Which resource helped you in your journey?
I love learning from people. Before the Internet, you could volunteer, talk to people. Nowadays you have a bunch of content creators from all over the place. I’m not saying you should follow everyone under the sun, but it’s an easy way for you to access experts or people who are very into a specific topic and get it at a blazing fast speed. It also helps you keep in touch. I always get asked a lot like, “How do you keep in touch with all the news?” It’s like, “I just follow a bunch of creators and they post a bunch of stuff and I watch a few videos and that’s it. I don’t need to be an expert, I don’t need to read the paper.” But that’s an easy way for me to keep up with the world.
The second one and this has always been it’s more around language, especially if you move to the US and English is your second language. I had a boss once from India and he had been in the States for 20 years, and he was like, “You need to get better at it.” Writing is not my biggest skill. Fortunately, or unfortunately for people who have English as a second language, the pandemic pushed everyone to write because we’re now remote and everything needs to be written. My biggest tip is to invest in either taking classes, or for me, what I did, I invest in this program called Grammarly, which is an AI, to help you track all these errors. I use that all the time with my friends at work. In anything, I do try to double-check and make sure that I have a helping hand and things are more clear. And so, I’ve gotten overall much better at my English writing just because of that. I read books, but it’s not my major thing.
I always recommend two soft skills. One is Switch: How to Change Things when Change is Hard from Chip Heath and Dan Heath. The other one is Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High by Kerry Patterson. Developing your soft skills is important in any field you are in. So, I definitely recommend those two.
As the world becomes more globalized and more, I think this is a crucial skill that you need to know. It’s a funny story, but I always remember one of the weird quirks about Puerto Rico is that since we’re part of the US, we get everything very early on. And I was the first kind of generation of people that had to learn English because at some point we weren’t getting anything in Spanish or it was like four or five times more expensive. I always remember my parents being like, it was a video game. I think it was The Legend of Zelda. I was like, “Don’t understand. I don’t understand the book either.” They bought me the guidebook. I was like, “Can you help?” And they didn’t know how to help. That’s like, for me, that was a big aha moment. It’s like, “I need to invest all my life in this otherwise, I can’t get forward.”
Keep learning, people. We live in a world where your brain is your biggest asset!
I hope you enjoyed the podcast. We will have more interviews with amazing Latinx leaders the first Tuesday of every month. Check out our website Latinx In Power to hear more. Don’t forget to share comments and feedback, always with kindness. See you soon.
Additional Reading Mentioned in the Interview
How to Change Things when Change is Hard from Chip Heath and Dan Heath
📩 Hola, Hi, Olá. Join the Latinx In Power!
We send emails no more than twice a month. Click here to subscribe!
