R29 Profile: Patty Delgado

This article was originally published on September 6, 2016

What’s your name and where are you from?

Patty Delgado, Texas born and raised

What is your job title at Refinery29 and what do you do?

I’ve worn many hats at R29, but now I’m focused on being a tech lead and senior software engineer. I’m also the resident Mac And Cheese cook-off champion.

How did you get into engineering?

I’ve always been obsessed with the internet and computers, since we first got a family Mac wayyy back in the day. I built websites for myself and my friends, basically blogs or message board sites on various topics, just for fun. I never really considered it a career path. Instead I focused on my love of writing and researching society, which led to my BA in Journalism and MA in Sociology. While still in school, I began to feel my job prospects in long-form journalism were slim (I also had sizeable student loan debt coming at me–thanks NYU!). Through some clever hustling and string pulling, I got my first official web job for work study on campus. I also picked up a lot of freelance work managing and building websites. I really fell in love with the job, since it had always been something that was a hobby for me, and my boss Tim Libert mentored me on what I needed to learn to get a job out of college. He was really great, and since then I’ve always made it a point to reach out to people as mentors in my career.

What’s a recent project that you’re proud of?

Refinery29 is currently rewriting our core web platform to be a responsive, React & Redux isomorphic website! We just launched this new app to about 75% of our pages, and are full steam ahead at converting the rest. It’s such a pleasure to work with the team that is building this app, and on a technology stack as progressive and forward-looking as this. Seeing our render times drop 30% and shaving literal seconds off the page speed is so, so beautiful.

If you weren’t an engineer, what would you want to be doing?

Traveling the world and writing essays and fiction pieces about the things I experience. Which is sort of what I do now except I’m writing code :)

What’s your favorite thing about working at R29?

The people. I’ve made so many for-life friends working here; it’s great to be able to work with so many inspiring people.

If you had a sandwich named after you, what would be on it?

Mortadella, ricotta cheese, castelvetrano olives, arugula, sliced tomato, and Croatian olive oil on whole wheat bread. These are basically all of my favorite sandwich things, with a shout out to the amazing olive oil from Croatia.

– Patty Delgado, Senior Software Engineer