Rachel Kroll
Production Engineer · Facebook
“I learned to code when I was 5. I was just a curious kid. My neighbor had a Commodore 64 and gave it to my family with the manual after he got a newer computer. I learned how to code in BASIC from the manual and do things like change the color of the screen. I didn’t know I was an outlier until years later. It just happened. I wrote programs to suggest things to do when you are bored like ‘Do you want to go outside?’. Utilities have always been my thing — tools that help other people get things done and that continues to this day.”
“When I was 12 my family got a modem and I set up a bulletin board system (BBS) from my home, which is a very early version of chat rooms and message boards. I got into Linux and Unix along the way. I became the TA for computer class my sophomore year in high school to get out of the boredom of study hall. I learned how to run a Unix box and was the only one who knew how in the entire school system. I continued to be the sysadmin until I was a junior in college.”
“I did a stint in Customer Support at Rackspace and spent some time as a Site Reliability Engineer at Google — making sure their servers could handle the requests and the load no matter what people throw at it.”
Now Rachel works at Facebook on Web Foundation. She does outreach to help people design systems at scale, teaches best practices, and jumps in when the going gets tough. “I’m the one that notices if there is a smoldering brush fire that could turn into a forest fire. My job is to call attention to it, teach others how to spot it, and brainstorm about how to put it out. The thing that keeps me going is getting to help people with actual problems. If my job ever turns into a deal that is strictly fixing computers and not interacting with the people, I’m gone.”
Rachel also runs the tech blog Rachel by the Bay where she posts about everything from coding tips, to best practices, to wages & working conditions.
Rachel’s advice when encountering challenges is to remember that “big problems are composed of little problems. It’s a matter of finding the smaller ones and cracking away at some of those. I’m better able to identify when I talk my way through it with a person and circle around it a few times. I see places where I can crack it apart.”
