Hello, I’m Joanne. I grew up in the quaint little suburbia of Orange, CA - right next to Disneyland. Yeah, believe it or not… I wasn’t really a fan of the amusement park (but strangely enough I am now!). I grew up a tomboy; my favorite toys were Legos and video games, I hated wearing dresses, and I thought Barbie dolls were scary (FaceSwap Barbie with Chuckie). As the first child in my family, parents were pretty strict on me and had a pretty strong hold on what I could and couldn’t do. One day, in my sophomore year in high school, I was not allowed to play video games anymore. (You can guess my reaction.) As terrible as that was at the time, that actually opened up a new path for me; I started making websites with homestead and geocities (remember those?). I wasn’t happy with the ads or counting arrow key strokes to count how many pixels I was moving my text and images on my page to get things to line up well, so I started researching how I could build better looking websites and have more control of the features. Believe it or not, there was a time when I pulled up Notepad (not even Notepad++) and typed up everything manually to create a website. As tedious as that sounds, I was blown away by how cool it was. That was 2002. I learned how to build and launch my websites via FTP, and every day was a new adventure in learning. But then college came looming around the corner and I asked myself what was I going to do with my life. I thought to myself, “making websites is fun and all, but there’s no way I could turn that into a career…”

[Seriously?!… The present day me is still in disbelief by how misguided I was.]

So years passed by, I forgot about web development and went off to study molecular and cell biology, hoping I would one day be saving lives as a doctor. Yay! It took me three years into college and several internships and lab positions later to realize that wasn’t what I wanted to do anymore. I am still working in healthcare now because it’s the industry I’ve known best all my life and I’ve slowly but surely come around to realizing one thing: I love technology, specifically everything that has to do with computers and software. I’m a business analyst/project manager/software implementation specialist - call it what you will - and my favorite part of my job is software troubleshooting. Most people throw their hands up at a software problem or run around screaming “fire!” while my initial instinct is more like: “Hmmm. Why is that happening? How do these systems work together and which part of the connection is breaking? What was the logic that a developer might have used to put this feature together?” And when I can’t find the solution I might be figuratively banging my head against the wall, but at the same time my mind feels stimulated and I’m thinking, “this is really interesting.” I’ll then pass it on to a developer with my research and thoughts and wait to get feedback. Sometimes I’ll find pretty interesting problems that turn into enhancements and I think: “Awesome! I understand how things are working enough to make a difference on the future of the product.”

[So now what?]

I have great work-life balance and flexible work from home options, my job is pretty easy, and I could choose to coast on this path forever. But you know what? I don’t think that’s what I want. I’m 30 young and I’m not even a third of the way through my career. As much as coasting is great, I don’t feel like I’m at my best. I’m bored and I feel like my role has little impact. I am tired of configuring software and trying to solve problems with limited tools. I want to be excited by what I’m doing and be the one to be actually solving problems! At some point I discovered that JavaScript was an optional tool we could use to support our product so I started to study JavaScript in my free time after work. I loved what I was learning and began customizing our product at work to better tailor to my clients - awesome! I began to realize I really wanted to know more about what development does and I want to work on what they are working on because I think their challenges are fun, and they are the ones at the heart of creating solutions or solving problems for all external and internal users.

A developer I was working with once asked me, “What’s your background? Do you even KNOW any JavaScript?” “No…” I replied, sheepishly. It was a challenging moment to feel like an imposter and to be discredited so suddenly like that during my learning phase. While I was slightly hurt in that moment, it also changed me - it motivated me to practice and study the language more and soon I was the go-to JavaScript expert on our implementation team. I was no developer, but people looked to me as the last stop before reaching out for help from our development team. That alone was an amazing feeling - I think about what all I could do as an actual developer and the impact I could have, and I think about what I could be building as solutions for my team or clients, taking on the creationist side of software rather than reactive client service. All of that possibility really excites me and is what brings me here to where I am now.

I’m Joanne and I’m here to:

build stuff

solve problems

make user experience a part of every piece of software

and

#hacktheratio.