This article was originally posted here by Wogrammer. When Olivia Horace started high school, she intended on becoming an explosives technician. While it’s hard to beat the appeal of blowing stuff up, an inspirational high school teacher helped her discover she had a talent for computer programming and she turned her interests to software engineering. She found the world of programming purely by chance. Oliva was supposed to be in a woodworking class but was placed into a computer science class instead. At first, she hated it, but once she
In May 2018, Twitter officially released the Account Activity API to help developers build solutions that enable businesses to create better customer engagement experiences on its platform. On the team of engineers that worked on the API is Babatunde Fashola, a Nigerian software engineer that has worked at Twitter for the past three years building products now used by millions of people around the world. Many Nigerians may recognize the Twitter software engineer’s name as that of the former Lagos state governor and current Minister of Power, Works, and Housing.
Tell us about your personal passions! I’m incredibly passionate about increasing diversity in tech and making sure minorities are equipped with the proper skills to excel in the space. Over the last ten years, I’ve only had the privilege of working with a handful of minorities. Diversity and inclusivity in tech is a problem, and we can no longer blame it on the hiring pipeline. We have to be intentional and create a space that works for everyone. What’s one childhood lesson that you still carry with you to this
BetterUp is hiring on pocitjobs.com Long before working for IBM and BetterUp, Bryan Hickerson initially hesitated to pursue a career in programming. “Computer science has a reputation for being very difficult,” Bryan says, “having impostor syndrome, I thought that maybe I wasn’t good enough to do that.” In the 1990s as a young Black American, Bryan couldn’t find a role model in the tech industry he could aspire to. It was his father, a systems administrator at Boeing, who encouraged Bryan’s interest in computers and programming. “We actually built my first
About three years ago, I published a story about how the Twitter app I built in high school, Follow, reached 150,000 downloads in two years. In that article, I alluded to the even larger story about how I got into software. Well, here it is. Nine years ago today (wow!) I got my first remote gig writing software. I didn’t have an official title or anything, but I was writing scripts in Java. To give you some perspective, 10 years ago I was in 9th grade, 13 years old, with
Originally published here via Wogrammer Nettrice Gaskins’ technology journey began in a seemingly unlikely place: an arts high school in Louisville, KY. “I was on a visual arts track. During my junior year, a teacher who taught pottery decided she wanted to teach computer graphics. So she recruited students in their senior year who needed to take an elective. Initially, I was not interested in computer graphics, but she opened up a new area of interest for me, and that work is what got me into college.” Nettrice’s winning computer
Originally posted by Wogrammer. Victoria Chávez’s teenage rebellion was taking computer science as an elective in high school. Her mother and grandmother had immigrated from Guatemala to Chicago for a better life for Victoria and had no idea what computer science was, but they noticed that people working with computers on television did not look like Victoria. They were hoping she might become a doctor. But Victoria was “blown away by all the cool things [she] could do through programming and by the sequential thinking and amazing problem solving it
Originally posted by Wogrammer, written and edited by Shruti Kumar Sundas Khalid had never considered attending college, let alone a profession in engineering. As a young woman coming from a conservative family in Faisalabad, Pakistan, she says receiving an education and building a career was unheard of. Shortly after finishing high school in Pakistan, Sundas got married and came to the United States in 2004 to live with her husband. After a six-year gap in her education, she decided to pick up where she left off and further her studies. Sundas
