Interview with Nat Alison

One of the women at the heart of React

Nat is the freelance engineer who made Reactjs.org available in languages from all over the world and redesigned React Native’s site in 2019. In this interview, she gives us a peek at her freelancer lifestyle and the challenges of internationalization. You can find her on Twitter as @tesseralis.

What do you do?

I’m a freelance software developer! I’ve worked with the React team setting up translations of the reacjts.org documentation site and with the React Native team to redesign their website. Before freelancing, I worked on a personal project called the Polyhedra Viewer, a visualizer of 3D shapes. I’m currently working with the Gatsby team to set up translations of their docs!

What got you into OSS? React?

My first foray into OSS was in college: I helped contribute statistical functions to the symbolic math library SymPy. Since then it’s just kind of been the default? GitHub is ubiquitous and we relied on a lot of open source libraries for various jobs I had, so I’d sometimes have to contribute to fix a bug. All my projects were on GitHub because, well, everyone else was doing it!

As for React: I was working for a company whose frontend was written in Angular 1 and we were planning to refactor the whole thing to React. I tried it out by remaking an old project of mine and fell in love with it! It allowed me to code so much faster and reduced the time for me to go from an idea to code. Then I watched Dan Abramov’s egghead.io course on Redux and the rest was history.

What drew you to this community?

I think what brought me the most visibility in the community was my polyhedra project and my work on localization. Other than that, a lot of the React team and community like to meme on Twitter so I guess that’s another commonality.

What was your experience like in the React community?

I would say the experience with the community has been mixed. The React team is lovely and at every React-focuses conference I’ve been to, everyone has been friendly and respectful. That said, the community is still dominated by white men. The conferences I’ve been to that focused on React are mostly white and male, and it seems that the same five voices dominate the conversation. Rachel made a thread about women in React and a lot of the women mentioned don’t work with React anymore — they’ve left the community. I myself have started playing in Vue! I think we really have to ask ourselves why React draws attention to and signal boosts certain types of people and pushes others away.

Tell us about your work with translating the React docs — why did you do that? How hard was it to kick off and follow through on?

Dan Abramov (a React Core team member) told me to do it.

The process actually went pretty smoothly! Luckily, we had a lot of amazing developers that volunteered their time to help translate the docs, which meant that some languages, like Japanese and Spanish, were able to get their docs translated within a month!

The hardest thing to work on was the automation to keep the different language branches updated. I had to work with backend code, cron, and Heroku for the first time in a long time so it was a struggle to get that set up. As I’m typing this, the bot is apparently broken so, uh, I should probably fix it at some point.

Now you’re working with Gatsby.js — what’re you up to?

Same thing! I’m helping Gatsby localize their documentation website. A lot of the requirements are different, so it’s an interesting challenge. With React (whose website is written in Gatsby!) our priority was to get it done quickly, so we were free to do weird things like “copy the entire website into another repo”.

But Gatsby is a website-building framework, so ideally our solution would take advantage of Gatsby’s strengths itself and serve as an example to other Gatsby users on how to translate their site.

How do you balance what you do with having a life?

Being a freelancer makes it so that I can set my own hours, which is really good for my mental health. I also usually have some time in between contracts that I can use to rest, pursue my other hobbies, and work on personal projects.

What do you like to do when you aren’t hacking?

Watch anime, play video games, make memes on Twitter.

What is your workspace like?

Ahahaha what workspace?

*looks nervously at cluttered table where I put my laptop*

What’s the biggest challenge you’ve overcome?

Around October 2017 I was depressed, anxious, and severely burnt out. I quit my job and decided to take time off to get help, and figure out who I was. I went to therapy, started taking medicine, worked on a project I was passionate about, and spent time trying to find a community that accepted me. And at the end of that, I came out with an awesome project, a sustainable line of work, friends from all over the world, and a better understanding of who I am.

This interview appeared in a condensed format in the 2019 Women at the Heart of React Zine. It is part of a series of interviews with women who contribute to React Core and organize the React Community. Portrait by Xyra Brittney.

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