How to Become a Developer with No Time and No Money: An Interview with Amina Adewusi
In just over a year, Amina Adewusi went from teaching herself how to code to joining the engineering team at Guardian News & Media and speaking at industry events. Here she tells us about her inspirational journey and why we should all encourage diversity in developers
Amina Adewusi was living her dream. As an independent investment analyst working across sub-Saharan Africa, she travelled frequently. When she and her husband decided to start a family, Amina remained optimistic that she could continue that work. But soon after becoming a mother at the end of 2017, the reality hit that her lifestyle wasn’t sustainable. Her baby needed a lot of her attention and energy. Accepting that she had to find a job that allowed her more flexibility, Amina googled ‘work from home’ and discovered that 80 per cent of the jobs that looked attractive to her were for software engineers. Amina, however, had no development experience.
She began researching coding bootcamps and found a lot in her hometown of London but they weren’t accessible to her. “My son was still very young and I wasn’t getting any sleep,” Amina remembers. “So the thought of going to a bootcamp Monday to Friday, nine to five, was absolutely impossible. Nevertheless I’m still really grateful that bootcamps exist because I benefited from their positive marketing material. It made me believe that I could do it. I chose to start learning Ruby as my first programming language because one of the bootcamps was advising it and had some materials on their website. I believe as long as you learn one language you can transpose that knowledge into others.”
While bootcamps can be a good entry route for some people, Amina warns of their limitations. “I advocate for companies to not just focus all their hiring of junior developers on bootcamps,” she explains. “Some companies actually ring-fence budget just for a certain bootcamp and they think that’s their answer to diversity. Bootcamps can also be very expensive and the pace can be very fast, which may make it difficult to absorb all the information. There are big questions around the effectiveness of the education you get from some of the bootcamps as well but [on the plus side] they connect you to employers, which is what I struggled with.”
Tapping into the community
The only software engineer Amina knew was someone she met during a school trip to Jordan. She hadn’t spoken to him in 10 years but contacted him on LinkedIn. As well as giving her some tips, he connected her to a mother on his team. Amina then used LinkedIn to search for people who had done bootcamps that she was interested in and asked them for feedback on her ideas. She spoke to at least 30 developers.
“It was phenomenal; everyone was super helpful,” Amina recalls. “Some people got back to me within minutes and what was really shocking to me was that everybody had something different to say. I thought that after a few phone calls, I would start getting the same advice but it just didn’t happen. That has really continued until today. No matter who I reach out to, I tend to learn something new.”
The suggestions ranged from following tutorials and taking part in coding challenges to joining communities both offline, such as Code First: Girls , and online, such as Slack and Gitter. Amina tried everything. Setting up a GitHub account and contributing to open-source projects, even before she could write a line of code, turned out to be an especially important part of her self-teaching process.
Embracing openness in open source
“I found two repos that interested me and I was just captivated. People all over the world are giving their free time to work together and build something. And so many projects are trying to make this world a better place or just improve access to information. I was struck by how kind the maintainers were to me. I made so many mistakes, I didn’t know anything but they would respond to my questions with annotated images to help teach me. One of my main mentors paired with me every single week for three hours from Lexington in Kentucky!”
Amina grew so passionate about open source, she created a GitHub repo for her learning plan, which she used to record her programming journey and get advice from her mentors. She also attended meetups, such as Codebar, a non-profit initiative focused on underrepresented groups in tech, as well as ScalaBridge, which runs free workshops on programming in Scala. Conferences posed another opportunity to meet developers and learn more about the industry culture.
“I took full benefit of the diversity scholarships that a lot of events offer,” Amina points out. “We have such a vibrant conference calendar in software engineering. It’s one of the things that I love about our industry. I would often just go up to people at conferences and start asking about their careers. I received a lot of useful advice and then connected with people afterwards to help build up my relationships.”
From teaching yourself to first job
Once Amina started coding, she quickly realised she enjoyed the creativity and the problem-solving aspect but it wasn’t always easy and at some point she burned out. “I had a very public breakdown during a coding workshop, which really was aimed at experienced React developers. Everyone was typing away but I was just staring at my screen and might as well have been reading Chinese — I just didn’t understand anything! I started crying and couldn’t stop. The instructor was trying to comfort me but I realised that I had pushed myself a little bit too far. It made me realise that I needed to take my time and prioritise my wellbeing.”
Another mentor encouraged Amina to start applying for jobs very early on.
And although she received a lot of rejections (she competed with a friend on how many they could get in one day), she benefited from the conversations with HR and used the technical tests she was given to structure her learning. Still, after just nine months of teaching herself how to code, Amina was accepted on the Guardian’s Digital Fellowship programme as an associate software engineer and is currently working on the Android app.
“The scheme allows you to rotate around different teams for one year before you join one permanently,” she explains. “I feel extremely happy. Every day is different, I frequently pair with my colleagues and they let me prepare conference talks during work hours.”
Even though Amina is still very new to the industry, she’s already given talks at events like renowned JavaScript and web conference ffconf. “It wasn’t actually my choice,” she laughs. “One of my mentors forced me to attend Global Diversity CFP Day, a fantastic initiative taking place all over the world. There I put together my first talk proposal — on embracing openness in open source — and it was accepted to Brighton Ruby. I think there’s actually a demand for people from underrepresented groups and also junior developers to speak.”
Improving diversity and inclusion in the tech industry
Her ffconf talk on what it takes to become a developer with little time and money became a call-to-action to increase diversity in the industry.
“We have to think about recruitment in a different way,” Amina urges. “How are we going to affect change if we don’t let juniors from diverse groups in the industry? I was really lucky because I got into the Guardian’s programme. They were trying to find people from unconventional backgrounds who didn’t have a computer science degree or hadn’t done a bootcamp. But just two out of 130 applicants got in and there are so few of these schemes. Competition is fierce at junior level, especially in London and in the final round there were quite a few PhDs and people already working as developers. Now I’m the only black woman in a department of 80 engineers, one of two mothers and all of the maybe 20 women are white. I’ve never been in an industry like that. It’s so shocking and I’m reminded of the inequalities daily. I’m optimistic though. I think it’s going to change and we’ll see a positive trend.”
Amina’s automatic response was to start solving the problem. She signed up to a diversity group at the Guardian and gave an internal talk on how to support new developers. Soon her days started filling up with non-technical work. But Amina decided to focus on her job instead. Her goals for this year include becoming the best developer she can be, starting to speak about technical topics and understandably investing in her family and personal life again.
The importance of mentorships
She might be stepping back from doing diversity work herself but Amina
encourages others to step up and start welcoming people without a formal education into the industry. As she explains in a post on CSS-Tricks, mentorship is a fantastic way to contribute to a more diverse community. It’s another topic she’s passionate about, as so many people helped her on her learning journey. She now mentors other junior developers herself.
“I feel a real sense of happiness that the challenges I’ve gone through and the things that I’ve learned are being put to good use. One of my mentors said that even if you’ve only been coding for a month, you can start to help someone else. That’s so true. You can help others very quickly — there’s always going to be someone who is one month behind you who could benefit from your perspective.”
Amina also writes regular Medium posts and makes short YouTube videos to document her day-to-day working life and give other new developers an insight into her career path. Couple mentorships with building websites in the open (for example, by pairing and giving code reviews or writing approachable documentation) and anybody can make a huge difference. For 2020, Amina suggests challenging ourselves to support at least one person from an underrepresented group trying to get into the engineering industry. Change can only happen if we work on it together. It’s the only way to ensure skilled developers like Amina are no longer an exception.
This article originally appeared in issue 330 of net magazine in 2020 and has been reviewed by Amina Adewusi prior to republication.
