From Coding Challenge to Evangelist: My Remarkable Journey in Tech

The entire journey began with my decision to change my career last year.

I wanted to improve my coding skills, continue my learning journey, and connect with women going through similar experiences. I was living in London, and one day, I came across the “Christmas Coding Challenge 2022” organized by Women Who Code London on LinkedIn.

It was a fantastic opportunity for me because I’ve always loved doing work that excites me throughout my career. I joined through the WWCode Slack channel and immediately introduced myself with my story, where I also observed other women generously sharing their experiences and supporting each other. It was truly amazing.

With this coding challenge, which included two of my friends, we started coding, committing to GitHub every day and sharing this adventure on my LinkedIn and Twitter accounts. My path to getting involved with the community began with the excitement of this journey.

After the challenge ended, I was asked to write about my experience for the WWCode site; that’s how my first blog post was published. Afterward, I found myself in the WWCode Slack channel every morning, wondering what had been shared that day and how I could contribute to benefit everyone.

As I started attending online events, I met the generous women I had only exchanged messages with until then, face-to-face. Listening to their experiences helped me take stronger moves in my career path. Through this community, I was also awarded technical conference tickets, and these conferences significantly improved me professionally, while the workshops I attended and other tech-community activities offered incredible networking opportunities.

Becoming an Evangelist

Once I was an active member of the WWCode community, it was time to support other women. I began contributing in small ways to their efforts. One day, I was given an amazing opportunity: “Would you like to become an evangelist?” It was an incredible offer, which I accepted. 

Sharing what I had learned with other women and supporting them on their career paths was amazing. At that moment, Helen Keller’s quote came to my mind: “Alone, we can do so little; together, we can do so much.” We could achieve so much together, and I was now an Evangelist for Women Who Code.

The Journey Ahead

There is still much to be done, and I am aware of that. Women Who Code is the largest and most active community of engineers dedicated to inspiring women to excel in technology careers. We envision a world where women are represented as technical executives, founders, VCs, board members, and software engineers. 

According to recent data, gender equity in the tech industry has a long way to go: sadly, only a mere 5% of software engineers are women. You can read more about this here. 

However, through roles like Evangelists for WWCode, we will continue to write new stories about women playing a significant role in the tech industry.

Throughout this journey, I want to express my heartfelt thanks to the Women Who Code London leaders, Irina Kamalova and Rajani Rao, from whom I have always felt support. I greatly appreciate their incredible guidance.