Crypto pioneering: Meet Nuri’s female techmakers 👩💻
Despite the growing presence of women engineers entering the startup scene as developers, the numbers are still not high enough to make a fuss about. That’s where Bitwala comes into play. 👩🚀
While we’re all for revolutionising how we bank, use crypto and make everyday payments, there are a few things we want to revolutionise inside the Bitwala office ourselves. We’re hiring more female developers because we believe the fight for inclusion and equality begins at home.
We’re ambitiously pushing these stereotypes out and aim to have our developer team proportionately male/female by the end of 2020.
Many initiatives are cracking the proverbial glass ceiling, and we’re glad that non-profit organisations such as Women Techmakers, Women who code, Geek Girls Carrots are present in Berlin. Iron Hack and Le Wagon encourage women to understand new technologies and provide a stepping-stone to those who want to enter their dream career as developers. It is fundamental that businesses today continue to advocate gender diversity in tech and eliminate the gender career opportunities gap.
Keen to gain a better understanding on how to begin or change to a tech career we decided to interview our three full-stack developers. Anastasiia, Sarah and Nelly.
How did you become an engineer? What made you choose this career?
Anastasiia
I was studying piano and teaching at a music school. I wanted to set up a website for the school and bought a Wordpress account to create a simply-designed site. I soon realised I needed more freedom to design the website the way I wanted but I didn’t have enough money to pay for a developer to set up the site, so I started to learn coding myself. From there, I switched my life completely to coding.Learning how to code has been amazing for me, it has enabled me to build whatever I want.
Sarah
I have a background in biology and had been working in science publishing and communication. With all the new high-tech products emerging, I realised that tech pushes boundaries in research and that’s what I wanted to do. I started learning some basic coding skills at home and as I was really into it, I then decided to join the Ironhack web development bootcamp. Now I here at Bitwala want to learn about Blockchain tech.
Nelly
I wasn’t satisfied with my university classes, so after winning a partial scholarship for the Ironhack web development bootcamp and completing it in October, I decided to quit university and pursue a career in tech. I love how programming combines being creative and solving problems. I don’t regret my choice at all, and I’m excited for where this journey will take me.
What are your ambitions in your engineering careers?
Nelly
Learn as much as possible now and in the future, teach coding.
Anastasiia
I’d like to go into Software Architecture.I’m also thinking about running Javascript courses here in Berlin and at Bitwala.
Sarah
The first thing for me is to expand my “tech horizon”. In the long run, I’d like to contribute to some open access projects and try to get some own projects up and running.
What does a typical day at Bitwala look like?
Anastasiia
One day is full of meetings, the second day might be pair programming, the third day we are fixing everything that we have done during pair programming, so every day is different!
Sarah
My day starts with a morning stand up with the team, where we discuss our plans, and then switch to morning deploy and code review.
Nelly
I just started, so I’ve been mainly doing onboarding related things,I’m getting familiar with the codebase. It’s super exciting to make Bitwala’s crypto banking experience as smooth as possible for our users!
What’s your favourite coding languages?
Anastasiia
I like Go because it’s a relatively new and fresh.
Sarah
My main language at the moment is JavaScript. I’d like to learn Python at some point, as I’ve seen a lot of great projects being built with it.
Nelly
I work with JavaScript and my short term goal is to get familiar with the Bitwala tech stack before going into other coding languages.
Top tips for women who want to start their career in tech or want to change to tech? Which type of thinking, abilities, skills, experience or education are required?
Anastasiia
Cultivation of empathy, open-mindedness, self-motivation, flexibility, and critical thinking have helped me to grow into a Fullstack developer, my best tips for you are:
- Do not rush.
- Learn how to google.
- Go to various programming meet-ups — you will not gain your knowledge significantly, but it is a good chance to network and collect things for googling
- Stay consistent, do not think and say you are master in something even if you have discovered a lot — there’s always something to learn!
- Be realistic.
It may take longer than six months to learn, so be patient!
Sarah
Meet people that share a passion for technology, a lot of the time you will be able to experiment technologies together. One of the most important qualities a programmer should have (in my opinion) is being patient, code isn’t perfect and it breaks so don’t be frustrated by these moments, stay calm and don’t be hard on yourself.
Nelly
Don’t believe that you need a CS university degree or any other qualification to start a career in tech. A lot of people are self taught or attended bootcamps, so if this is what you want, just do it.
Your inspirational woman in tech?
Anastasiia
All the women who did incredible engineering work throughout the years, especially the 50s. There was an amazing balance between elegance, refinement and clear mind, as well as the ability to work on growth and strategical logical thinking.
Sarah
For me it’s Ada Lovelace, simply due to her pioneering role in programming.
Nelly
After watching “Hidden Figures” I’d say Katherine Johnson and Dorothy Vaughan.
Interested in a fulfilling career in tech? Check out our job openings.
