Participant story: Ruth (they/them)
“I’d like to participate in expanding the doorway into tech for other neurodivergent, disabled people.”
1) Tell us a little about your life.
I’ve spent most of my life in Houston, TX and surrounding college towns except for a 3-month stint in Berkeley, California in 2011 that changed my life forever. I worked for a startup for the first time, and with a remote job I moved back home, got married, and ultimately went to graduate school after being laid off. The majority of my career after graduate school consisted of other tech support and documentation jobs at startups while I had a few kids, and I ultimately certified to teach in Texas. My first year of teaching ended in a pandemic, and I left the profession to keep my kids home safe while my partner continued working in the classroom. Despite my love for students, teaching as a transgender person in Texas (and really teaching in Texas in general) has major complications, so I felt it best to find a different path forward.
2) What made you decide to pursue a software engineering career and apply for Techtonica?
After almost two years of unemployment and no real idea of what to do next, I visited my older brother and asked for advice. His suggestion to consider programming reminded me of the fun I had learning bits of code years prior — a hobby that quickly fell away in competition with first-time motherhood. I reached out to a colleague from my first tech job for advice about how to start, knowing I couldn’t afford a bootcamp, and his spouse suggested I check out this thing called Techtonica (she volunteered there and it looked like a good match for me). With the application due just weeks later, I quickly switched from Codecademy’s Python course to the 113 required JavaScript lessons on freeCodeCamp. I took the timing as a sign and threw my entire self into the process.
3) What are you most excited to learn while at Techtonica?
On a personal level, I’m most excited to actually understand how the internet works. As a full-stack engineer, I’m not only going to know how to write what people see and what makes the actions behind the button-mashing work, but I’ll have a working understanding of how that communication occurs. Techtonica promises to help me see the big picture by the end, even if I don’t understand everything along the way, and knowing that there’s a support system built in to help me know when I’m off track encourages me to feel brave about giving my professional life to something I can’t fully conceptualize in advance.
4) What do you want to contribute to or change about the tech industry?
I qualified for this program for a variety of reasons. I’m transgender with they/them pronouns, have an autoimmune disorder that makes me intermittently physically disabled, and I have adult-diagnosed ADHD. Thanks to a white-privileged, college-educated background with access to physical and mental health services, I have the learning and coping skills necessary to succeed on this path. I’ve begun daydreaming about using my history as a teacher and support video creator to make materials about what I’m learning, detailing the tools and tricks that help me learn it. I’d like to participate in expanding the doorway into tech for other neurodivergent, disabled people.
5) What’s your dream project?
In my personal decolonization process, I unpack all sorts of internalized -isms continuously and in perpetuity, but I didn’t learn to do this at all until college and graduate school, an experience not everyone has access to. I’d love to build out a database and learning platform that directs users to curated content already available. Countless hours of labor have gone into generating thoughtful pieces of writing and other media to teach people, and helping others find their way to all those resources in one place sounds exciting and worthwhile.
