S25:E4 - Diversity Dialogues in Tech (Ale Thomas)

Saron talks to Ale Thomas, Developer Advocate and Web Developer at Kubeshop | Mixed Change. Ale talks about growing up in Mexico and learning to code on her own. She walks us through her career history and how she paved her way into tech without a CS degree. She highlights how mentors played a critical role in her coding journey and how important finding those mentors and a community is. Finally, Ale shares her thoughts on what inclusivity in tech means to her and the work she is doing to make an impact in the space. Show Links Partner with Dev & CodeNewbie! (sponsor) Ale's GitHub Ale's LinkedIn Ale's Instagram Ale's Twitter React Angular Scrum HackerRank DSA C# Python C++

Transcript

Printer Friendly Version

[00:00:05] SY: Welcome to the CodeNewbie Podcast where we talk to people on their coding journey in hopes of helping you on yours. I’m your host, Saron, and today we’re talking about representation in tech with Ale Thomas, developer advocate at Testkube.

[00:00:18] AT: We think there’s a lot of improvements. Yes, there’s a lot of women now in tech, but there’s still so much more to be done. And it makes you feel like you shouldn’t stand up because nobody else is, but like you’re also maybe the only one. So who’s going to do it if you don’t do it? So it’s tough.

[00:00:37] SY: Ale shares what kick-started her lifelong passion for tech, how she manages to balance learning with a healthy lifestyle, and her experiences with representation in the industry after this.

[MUSIC BREAK]

[00:00:53] SY: Thank you so much for being here.

[00:00:54] AT: Hi. Hi everyone. Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.

[00:00:58] SY: So let’s start at the very beginning of the early days. Tell me what it was like growing up. Was tech a big part of your childhood?

[00:01:06] AT: It surprisingly was, but not in the way I wish it was.

[00:01:10] SY: Okay, tell me more.

[00:01:12] AT: I grew up in a very small city in Mexico where I had access to a computer maybe when I was nine years old, maybe in fifth grade. But this was the computer that my mom used for work in her office. So after school, she would still have to work. So I would visit her at her office, stay there before we both went home, and I would just play on her computer. And one thing is sometimes, you know, how they’re blocked in some workplaces, so I didn’t have access to the internet. And the other thing that I could do was just tinker around with the computer itself. So that was an immediate love that I had for just using the computer, just being on it, even if I had no access to the internet. And I would spend all those hours just playing around with the software that came with that Windows machine. And after that, in high school, I had the opportunity to have a class that was a Java course. So that was my first interaction with coding itself. So I had my computer by then when I was in high school, right? I was 15 years old, maybe. And I already had my computer and I would spend most of the day on it. So I’ve always been very techie in a way that I’ve been addicted to computers and just glued to them on my free time. So that was pretty much my childhood with having access to a computer from very early on, I would say, and just immediately falling in love with it and just playing around with it.

[00:02:34] SY: What kinds of stuff did you do off a computer?

[00:02:37] AT: Different stuff. So I would like to try all the software that came with it, especially having no internet at first, right? So let’s say that I didn’t have access to the internet until I was maybe 12 when I got my first PC, but the things I did was I would make like illustrations on paint and animate them with movie makers. I would make a little short movies and stuff, which made my mom think that I would be an animator or like a director or something like that, but that was not the path that I followed at all. So I would do that. Then when I did have access to the internet, I would play online, I would also with my cousins. There was this platform that was called Jimdo. I don’t know if that’s how it’s pronounced, but it’s pretty much like a website builder. It was like a Blogspot, I think.

[00:03:24] SY: Yeah. I think so. That sounds familiar. Yeah.

[00:03:26] AT: Yeah. I never used Blogspot, but there was this thing called Jimdo where you could get a domain, domain.jimdo.com. And my cousins and I had this idea of maybe building a website where we had like games, like games.com. So what we would do is create this website, Jimdo.com, and kind of decorate it and style it and add games that we actually stole from these other websites. And this was our dream of having our own games.com version, but I did all those things before really diving into tech. I would just, like, really be interested in creating stuff with computers.

[00:04:07] SY: And when you were doing this exploration, these games and creating these things, did it ever at any point occur to you that maybe there was a career in tech waiting for you? Or was it just kind of all fun and games at the time?

[00:04:21] AT: It was really all fun and games. Even when I was in high school and I had this class that was entirely programming, I didn’t know that it was a career that I could pursue because I thought maybe this is like just a hobby. I didn’t have, I guess, enough information or enough examples that could show me that it was like software engineering, for example, was a career. So I didn’t. I had no idea. I have absolutely no idea. I just knew that this was something that I really enjoyed and that was really fun and I felt good at. But through at high school. I never thought, “Wow, I want to be a software engineer,” because I didn’t know I could be a software engineer, honestly.

[00:05:00] SY: Did you have any ideas of what career you could have or what you wanted to be?

[00:05:04] AT: Yeah. So another hobby of mine besides technology has been learning languages. So ever since I was a little kid, so my first language is Spanish. Obviously, because I grew up in Mexico, and then I started picking up English, obviously. And I also studied French and Portuguese. So I was good at languages as well. And that gave me the idea of, “You know what? Maybe I can do or maybe what I have to do is something with this “talent” that I have with languages.” So I wanted to do something like international relations or business. So when I was in high school, that was my objective to kind of go to college for that. And that’s what I went for actually. So I graduated high school. And then I started majoring in international business at a school there in my hometown. But yeah, it just wasn’t for me.

[00:05:58] SY: Wasn’t for you. Why not? What happened?

[00:06:01] AT: So the thing with just my background, I guess, and my interests, I was really not into social studies. I wasn’t really into that. I was very practical. I was a very practical kid, a very practical learner. So really the classes I enjoyed the most even when I was in international business were statistics or we even had this class that was Excel for business. So anything that had to do with computers just resonated with me so well and I was still like very blinded by this idea that software engineering is not a career. I didn’t know that. So even when I was in school studying for business, I did not enjoy any of the other classes that was like politics and stuff like that. And my favorite classes were math, anything that had to do with numbers, anything that had to do with playing around with the computer and then that class that covered Excel, I remember that they started teaching us like simple macros and stuff and immediately I would dive into that. I would put it on myself to spend extra time just understanding how it worked and what it meant. So I would start programming with macros, even though that we didn’t need that in the course. So that kind of made me realize that there was more that I could do with computers and that that was really just what I enjoyed. And in college, we had this class that’s called like algorithmic thinking. It’s like a base course. It’s for every major in my school. They don’t necessarily teach you programming, but they show you like how to write algorithms, how they work and just like how to design them. So there, my teacher was a computer science grad. So that’s when I discovered that people could graduate from that. So that’s when I really discovered that it was something that I could pursue, but it was a little late in my journey. I was like, I guess, at s

[...]

Original source