We would like to take a moment and shine the light on our female engineering colleagues, in a series of short interviews. We hope that this will inspire more women to join the tech world and make a difference! This week we are introducing #{name}
name = Bowie
Having worked as a full-stack developer for four years, Bowie joined door2door in October 2019 as a Software Engineer. She graduated from the University of Waterloo in Canada with a Geomatics degree as her major and Computer Science as her minor. After graduating, she decided to follow her passion and chose computer science as her future career.
When did you first start writing code?
Bowie: My first computer science course was in VBA in high school.
What was the first language you started in?
Bowie: The first language I seriously started in was C language.
Do you have a preference between frontend or backend development?
Bowie: I prefer the backend.
What was your biggest struggle when starting out?
Bowie: It was hard to connect the theories I learned in class to real-life applications, especially web applications. In class, we learned things like network, database, data structure and so on individually. It was a bit hard for me to figure out how they could be grouped together in applications. Also, because we use pre-defined wireframes and packages in real-life web development, we sometimes don’t pay attention to the actual implementation behind them.
Another factor was that because I only minored in Computer Science, I never actually took a course on operating systems. So understanding the server side was initially an obstacle for me.
Do you have any learning tips?
Bowie: Ask for recommendations from senior developers, who can usually give you better learning materials. Keep learning consistently. Computer science is a field in which you always have to learn new things. Always try to spend some spare time on self-improvement in the direction you are most interested in.
What made you want to become a developer?
Bowie: I love the fact that it can be challenging, motivates me to keep learning and can be applied in every field.
What do you like most about being a developer?
Bowie: The feeling of accomplishment I get when I finish a project, fix a bug or solve a problem, no matter if it is from working independently or team work.
What would you advise aspiring developers?
Bowie: Pair coding. Through my experience at door2door, I found that pair coding is actually a great way to motivate developers in a team to share ideas, learn from one another, and surprisingly, is much more efficient than I had imagined.
Do you have any pet projects? If yes, which one?
Bowie: No, currently I am not working on any side projects.
What do you enjoy doing apart from programming?
Bowie: Travelling. Because I come from a geography background, I really enjoy exploring different terrains and experiencing different cultures.
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Thank you Bowie for this very fun and insightful interview! If you enjoyed this chat and want to join us, check out our job postings and see you in the next episode!
