How I became a software engineer

I love learning and got into engineering by teaching myself to code. At university, I studied modern languages – French and Italian. This led to a job in market research, but I realised that this was not my passion.

I decided to join Code First: Girls, a non-for-profit organisation that teaches coding and tech skills to women and girls, and completed my level 1 and level 2 coding qualifications with the organisation’s evening classes. There I learnt HTML, JavaScript, Python and how to develop websites. My love of languages helped: I see both modern languages and coding languages as ways of communicating.

These new skills opened up the world of software engineering to me. Now I am a partner engineer for Twitter, where I help developers access Twitter programmatically.

What do you do?

When other sites embed Tweets or use data from Twitter, engineers are behind the code that allows this to happen. I help these engineers and developers use Twitter data in new and helpful ways. For example, one group of developers built an app that monitored Tweets over time to identify how floods were escalating during bad weather. This gave people an early warning so they could make better preparations and prevent damage. Another developer used Twitter to create an app that measures how dry the soil is, so your plant will Tweet at you when it needs watering!

Engineering

I love engineering because there is always something new to learn. There are a lot of resources online to help you learn and take on new challenges. For example, I took part in the #100DaysOfCode challenge to learn a new coding skill every day for 100 days. It’s different to learning at school because I get to choose what I learn, how and when, so it is always interesting.

Day to day

My job is full of variety, letting me travel and meet new people. I get to solve problems, write code, and see the Twitter developer platform being used across the world.