During a short business trip to Nigeria in 2015, Ike Okosa witnessed firsthand the nascent but bubbling tech ecosystem in the country. At the time, Okosa was running Swoop Media, a UK-based company that provided IT and digital marketing solutions to UK private schools. The UK-born entrepreneur, who was visiting for the first time in over a decade, admits he was unaware that the country had a tech ecosystem. However, attending the 2015 edition of Social Media Week in Lagos changed his notion, and he formed vital connections there that proved helpful in
Cummins is hiring on pocitjobs.com “Rarely is survival a learning tool,” says Dwendolyn “Dwen” Williams, a 24-year veteran in Information Systems. She’s currently working at Cummins, a Fortune 500 company that manufactures diesel and natural gas engines for Volvo and Ford. With her extensive career, Dwen mentors young hires of color about survival and the skills required to succeed in the tech industry. There’s been a rapid change in technology, which went from using awkwardly-shaped floppy disks to the serverless cloud storage during her career. But Black people and other
This post was initially published by Abstract! It highlights the career achievements and thoughts of Senior Front End Engineer Andrew McCloud. What personal passions bring you to Abstract? Design communities! I’ve been installing/building software for managing communities of designers since I was in high school. Shoutout phpBB, celerondude, Pixel2Life! In 2010, I attempted to create something similar to Abstract called Pixelcloud, inspired by Facebook’s internal design collaboration tool. What’s one childhood lesson that you still carry with you to this day? I can usually avoid the pain of finding out something on my
From the day I realized I was destined to be a coder, I knew I was going to be an underrepresented group in more ways than one. It started to hit me in the few classes I took throughout grade school, but I didn’t realize how much of a minority I was until college. I’m lucky that for the most part, I have been able to fit in with my other software engineering peers. But there is still a lot that I have realized about being the only woman of
When Justina Sanchez first began working at TÜV SÜD 15 years ago, her role had absolutely nothing to do with engineering. She began her career as an entry-level administrative assistant, with no exposure to what an engineering path would look like. During her few years at TÜV SÜD, however, Justina found herself surrounded by engineers constantly testing and certifying products before they shipped to ensure consumer safety. Intrigued by the constant experimentation process going on around her, she felt drawn to learn more. “[The engineering team] would get to do
TL;DR — This isn’t a self-promotional post about landing a job. It’s about embracing failure and hard lessons as a necessary part of the process in making a lofty dream become a reality. These days when people ask me how I’m doing, I would often ask if they’ve seen “The Pursuit of Happyness” because life for me is like the movie (mainly the ending). Through the pursuit of my own “happiness” — I learned valuable lessons in making a dream become a reality. Imagine celebrating your birthday with family and
Originally posted here via Wogrammer. Jette Hernandez is one of the toughest coders you’ve ever met. As a former collegiate athlete, yoga instructor, and personal trainer, Jette is well-versed in the strength and tenacity required to reach one’s peak potential. This competitive spirit proved useful for Jette when she steered her career in an unlikely and unexpected direction. While working at the registration table of a tech event to earn extra money, Jette was intrigued by the job descriptions she saw on the attendee name badges (mostly belonging to men).
Movin’ to the Music Looking back 5 years, I feel like I’ve failed many times over when I made the decision to leave a job in finance to pursue a music career in NYC. My job in finance entailed me informing my team of technological developments disrupting the banking industry, testing their new mobile app, and researching cybersecurity standards. After a while, I didn’t find my job to be as fulfilling or challenging as I thought it would be, but I stuck it through until one day I received a unique opportunity
