Nevertheless, Emily Reese Coded

Emily Claire Reese — Wed, 08 Mar 2017 12:44:11 +0000

I began coding because...

I was 23, working at Kickstarter on the Community team, and felt curious about how the website itself worked. I had always studied art and didn't have any previous coding experience. Once I really understood what could be built with code -- platforms dedicated to learning, creativity, art, inequality reduction, and more -- I knew I wanted to participate in the field.

I had just finished my master's thesis so filled up my newly free nights and weekends with HTML, CSS, Ruby, and JavaScript.

I moved over to the Kickstarter engineering team a year later!

I'm currently hacking on...

Tech education! I moved to Paris, France from NYC a few years ago and am Teaching Manager at OpenClassrooms, the largest online education platform in Europe (here's me):

I'm building a learning path on OpenClassrooms that teaches people to become frontend developers and culminates in an internationally-recognized degree. Students earn the degree by doing our projects, taking our courses, and getting help from a mentor once per week.

It's an incredible way to help people make the same transition to coding I did. I was privileged to already work for a startup, but there are people trying to become developers who lack access to the same resources and support systems. (Also pretty incredible: getting to meet the President of France when he came to visit us!)

I'm excited about...

Helping refugees and underprivileged communities find jobs in tech that pay well without them needing to shell out thousands of dollars for institutional education in other fields. We, the tech community, have a lot of great work to do here, especially in Europe.

I'm also excited to finally feel at home in France. I moved here on a whim, completely alone, and it's taken hard work to build what I have in this new country. I really encourage other women to do this: move somewhere entirely for yourself, and rebuild/rethink your life from in a new environment.

My advice for other women who code is...

Find your passion and code in order to help that passion. You don't have to code just for the sake of coding. You can code for art (ex. at a museum), for humanity (ex. at a nonprofit), or for anything else, and you'll make a difference.

Stay strong in your opinions, but always listen and reconsider your worldview.

Lastly, intersectionality is important. I'm a straight, able-bodied white woman, and though I've dealt with plenty of nonsense sexism, I'm still very privileged. It's only through listening and supporting stories from all marginalized communities -- through the lenses of race, class, ability, ethnicity, and gender -- that we can create a better environment for everyone.

Playing catch-up

Emily Claire Reese — Thu, 26 Jan 2017 17:36:35 +0000

One engineering mindset that has gotten in my way is the thought that I will never 'catch up on' what other people already know. With 23 of my 26 life years spent codeless, I falsely believed I'd always be working from a deficit and would never break even with the savoir-faire of my developer peers. I never had that same defeatist idea about studying art or foreign language, so wondering "I'm already behind, so why even bother?" was a brand new question I couldn't answer.

What is it about the engineering community that induces such fatalism in beginners? Beginners and experts alike believe that the sky's the limit with web, game, and hardware development, but it's difficult to maintain that hopeful attitude as a new person when stumbling on acronym after acronym or upon a particularly opinionated GitHub issue thread.

One cause at play here is that public street cred metrics for beginners and experts are entirely different. Beginners earn credit by earning badges on Codecademy, sharing links to their first blogs in Rails, or pushing their first apps to GitHub.

As time goes on though, these staggered, sharing-based metrics give way to a different kind of "success." Many beginners, including myself when I started, perceived experienced developers as those having a ton of Twitter followers, a massive contribution history on GitHub, or a collection of Strong Opinions On Programming Libraries.

In reality, those metrics have nothing to do with actual engineering. Having green square after green square on GitHub does not automatically mean someone is a responsible, smart, or admirable developer, nor does their having tweeted X number of times.

I want us to recognize that these metrics of 'mastery' are far too easy to latch onto as signs of programmer superstardom. Success metrics divorced from incremental, visible learning make it impossible for beginners to chart their courses aligned with the engineers they admire.

In other disciplines, signs of mastery are parallel between beginners and experts. New scientists write papers in school; expert scientists publish papers in journals. The concept of 'a paper' remains the same. It is one visible and consistent metric for assessing a scientist's knowledge, from newbie to pro. We do not have such a concrete, approachable metric in programming, and we must be more responsible about how we celebrate expertise.

If the engineering community teaches that "success" is having an intense web presence and being able to condescendingly chuckle about certain programming languages, we aren't demonstrating that studying and patience are the real routes to mastery. Anyone can snidely giggle about XYZ framework, but it takes a truly admirable developer to admit what they don't know or what they're learning.

No matter where you are in your learning, I encourage you all to do anything similar that shows your engineering journey instead of your destination. And beginners, you're not behind! You're already right where you're supposed to be. We all are. ♥