I interviewed Rike, the creator of the FemTech Bot
As some of you might know, a few weeks ago I started dabbling with a Rapsberry Pi and some Python. I chronicled my journey on Twitter, and quickly noticed that some of my tweets were retweeted by an account called @Femtech_
Looking closely, I realised @Femtech_ was a bot, configured to automatically retweet female developers topics. A subject that I hold dear, so of course I had to know more!
The Femtech bot has been crafted by Rike, so I contacted her to chat about her motivation and her work. She’s been kind enough to share her experience.
So Rike, tell me a bit about you?
I’m Ulrike (or just Rike), a web developer from Berlin, Germany.
Originally I worked in the library and media sector before I decided to study computer science and to turn my hobby into a career. Currently, I work in an automotive engineering company and I sometimes do freelance projects too. I also give workshops for beginners in web development at Informatica Feminale , a German summer school in Bremen, to inspire more women to get into web development.
What made you decide to create the bot? What were you aiming for?
There are basically two reasons.
At first, I tried to think about a way to engage in the female tech community on Twitter. Luckily, there are already a few very popular hashtags that are used to spread stories about female software developers and their projects. I love the encouraging atmosphere among hashtags like #WomenInTech or #GirlsWhoCode and had the feeling that they are worth having even more attention.
Secondly, I am a web developer and liked the idea about building a Twitter bot by myself: @femtech_ was born!
How did you code the bot?
I am a web developer with a focus on JavaScript, so the bot is built in Node.js. I detailed how to do it easily in a blog post.
What do you think about the posts that are retweeted? Do you sometimes delete some of the RTs? Do some people « abuse » the hashtag to get retweeted by the bot?
The @femtech_ bot looks up quite a few hashtags that are connected to female tech topics, so it tweets around every few seconds. This is a lot of content I usually cannot evaluate myself. I do have a look on what is posted from time to time, but luckily never had the feeling, that there is any real abusement, though I cannot avoid having some corporate advertising posts in the feed as well.
I mostly like the diverse stories that are shared from all around the world. Nevertheless, the bot retweets only English content.
I know that Twitter is not always a kind community. Did you get some bad experience from coding the bot?
No, not yet. There is critics regarding the hashtags the bot retweets in general, but I personally never received negative feedback.
Thanks Rike for kindly answering my questions, and for helping raise awareness on Women in Tech topics!
Find out more about Rike’s inspiring work on her personal blog and follow her on Twitter @Frankanka
For more content on sourcing, recruitment and tech (and a healthy dose of gifs), follow me on Twitter @Mathilde_Kzw
