Allie Janoch Steps Outside Of Her Comfort Zone
Written by WWCode HQ
Allie Janoch Steps Outside Of Her Comfort Zone To Achieve Success
Allie Janoch knew that she would be a computer scientist before she ever wrote her first line of code. Growing up in a household with a father who was a software engineer she was constantly encouraged to explore analytical pursuits – doing math problems at the dinner table each night and participating in the math club at her elementary school. At the age of 8 she convinced her parents to purchase their first family computer, and the time she started middle school, she was already writing in her yearbook that she wanted to grow up to be a software engineer. It wasn’t until she was 15 that she was able to take her first high school class on Visual Basic and C++.
In her own words, “After taking that first computer science class, I was completely hooked. I loved the feeling of building something and seeing the very tangible results in front of me on the screen. I also loved the creativity of programming, there is hardly ever a prescribed way of coding something.”
Pursuing her passion, Allie continued her education in college, where a professor encouraged her to step outside of her comfort zone and get involved in research. While she wasn’t sure if research was an area she was interested in, she took the advice of her professor and found it to be a rewarding experience. Later, when looking into graduate school programs, that background in research gave her the edge needed to secure an acceptance letter from the University of California, Berkeley.
Half way through her doctoral program Allie had another tough decision to make. Earning a Phd from Berkeley is a prestigious achievement, but she was growing weary of research and wasn’t sure if it was the right field for her. After reviewing her options carefully, she eventually opted to make the more difficult and unconventional choice of leaving school to join a startup called IQE. There she had some of the most fun and inspiring experiences of her life.
When asked about the decision Allie said, “Many of the most rewarding experiences I’ve had in my career and education have come when I made the choice to do something that made me a little (or a lot) uncomfortable and nervous. This often can mean saying yes to things that my gut says no to.”
When IQE was acquired by Yahoo, she got a position working as a software engineer for their Flickr division, but she wasn’t done taking risks just yet. After attending a Women Who Code event in 2013 which featured 5 prominent female VC speakers and a host of information about startups, she got inspired and decided to leave her lucrative day job in order to pursue her dreams of starting her own company.
Today Allie is CTO and co-founder of Mapistry, a platform for displaying, creating and analyzing spatial data taken from a number of sources. In that position she is responsible for guiding the direction of both the product, and the technology. This allows her to pursue her love of programming, while also leading and driving the day to day business operations. She considers this to be her dream job, and her goal is to work towards making her company the biggest success possible.
Follow Allie on Twitter.
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