S26:E6 - Embracing Rest for Productivity (Ronesha Dennis)

Saron chats with Ronesha Dennis, Founder and Lead Engineer at Bergeron-Woodley. Ronesha talks about growing up and how tech played a role in her childhood (her first website was a fan site for Lil Bow Wow). She talks about how she ended up in another career for 5 years until she sat down and thought about things she liked doing as a child without being paid for doing those things. This led her to want to get into tech. She decided to leave her job, move back with her parents, and do an 8-week program on Ruby on Rails. She then did a fellowship with Code for Progress. After graduating, she landed a job as a consultant then advanced to an Engineer, a Senior Engineer, and finally to managing other Engineers. She has authored coding books and she has her company building applications for nonprofits and other small businesses. Ronesha speaks on the mental health break she took after making the switch to tech and how important it is to give yourself space and time to take breaks after a career transition. Show Links Partner with Dev & CodeNewbie! (sponsor) Python, the Relatable Way Coding with Cornell Ruby on Rails Ronesha's GitHub Ronesha's Instagram Ronesha's Twitter

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[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 making rest a priority with Ronesha Dennis, Founder and Lead Software Engineer at Bergeron-Woodley Company.

[00:00:19] RD: One of the things that I said to myself was I am not going to allow myself to fail. You’ve already overcome adversity in your life before. So this is just a stepping stone to get you to that next level of where you want to be. And if you don’t take this step back, what is going to happen is that you’re going to be five years later in this same position. So you have to take the step back if you want to move forward.

[00:00:47] SY: Ronesha shares when her childhood interest in code turned into a reality and how she’s hoping she can help others spark their passion for coding from a young age after this.

[MUSIC BREAK]

[00:01:05] SY: Thank you so much for joining us.

[00:01:06] RD: Thank you for having me. I’m so excited.

[00:01:08] SY: So let’s start all the way at the beginning in the early days. What was life like growing up for you? Was tech a big part of your childhood?

[00:01:16] RD: So actually it was, and it was very interesting. I grew up in the ’90s and we had a dial-up connection and we had one computer, which I believe my mom got from work. And fortunately, she allowed me to kind of take over that computer and take over our phone line so that I could kind of explore. And that’s what I did a lot of. So I spent a lot of time on the computer and eventually I found an interest in what I did not know at the time was coding. So I found an interest in doing HTML and building MySpace pages and just really kind of getting to practice different things on websites. Over time, I want to say I was probably 12 or 13 at this time, one of my favorite musicians at the time, I wanted to create a fan site for this musician because fan sites were becoming a really big thing. So I wanted to create a fan site for this musician. And I call this out because this was one of those times when I kind of really learned something about tech that I didn’t know was a thing to know. And he had a game on his website. This was rapper Lil Bow Wow. He had a game on his website and I really wanted that game on my fan site. And so I took some time so I could explore and I learned about iframes and using iframes so that I could put his game on my fan site. And the fan site actually ended up being pretty popular years later. Into adulthood, I would talk to people and I would tell them about this and they’re like, “I use that site before.” [00:03:09] SY: Wow! Oh my goodness! That’s so cool!

[00:03:13] RD: So it was really, really fun. But that was probably like the early interest into tech and learning how to code. And I have to tell you, at that point in time, again, I didn’t even know that this was called coding.

[00:03:31] SY: So if you weren’t thinking of your fan page and your iframes, you weren’t thinking of that as a career at that age, did you have any career-related aspirations? What did you want to be at that point?

[00:03:43] RD: Yeah, at that point in my life, I also really enjoyed writing poetry.

[00:03:48] SY: Oh, okay.

[00:03:49] RD: So I thought about, like, maybe becoming a poet, maybe doing creative writing of some kind, but I really didn’t know. I was not raised in a household where our career was really pushed on us. Of course, our parents would say things like, “Oh, I want a doctor and an engineer and a lawyer.” They definitely said those things, but in the grand scheme of like how we were truly treated and how we got to kind of take a deep dive into our own interests, none of those things were pressed upon us. It was, “Let’s find what you actually enjoy doing.” [00:04:29] SY: Okay. So at some point, computer science and coding became an interest. When did that happen for you? Was there a moment maybe in high school, middle school, where you started to focus a little bit more on those skills?

[00:04:41] RD: I did. So when I was in high school, I went to a great school where we got to focus on kind of different interests. I like to call them majors, but of course that’s not what they were called at the point in time that we were in school. It was just very much so like having a focus on a specific thing. I selected the computer technology path and I selected that because, oh, I knew I loved being on the computer, I had loved building that fan site and things of that nature. So I said, “Oh, this should give me a greater idea into what this can truly be,” because now I’m actually thinking about, “Well, what do I want to do and what do I want to major in, in college, and all of those things for my future?” But I have to admit that taking those classes actually made me question whether or not I wanted to move into computer science or computer technology.

[00:05:39] SY: Interesting. It had the opposite effect.

[00:05:41] RD: Yeah. Yeah. The reason for that was that we did not have a deep focus on coding.

[00:05:48] SY: Oh, okay.

[00:05:49] RD: Our focus was very much so on networking, IT, setting up routers, things of that nature, which I truly did not have an interest in. I understood it and I was able to do the work and piece things together. But in terms of it being fulfilling for me, it was not that at all. And so afterward, as I was thinking about what I really wanted to do when I considered what I wanted to study in college, it kind of made that a secondary choice for me.

[00:06:27] SY: Interesting. Was there something that was primary? Was there something that took over and caught your eye instead?

[00:06:32] RD: I think what it was, was that I had always had that childhood interest in writing as well and poetry and just kind of exploring myself creatively in that way. And so I decided in college to major in journalism. And I had a minor in computer science, so there was still that interest in tech there, but I decided to study journalism. And although looking back, because, again, hindsight is 2020, looking back, I think it was a great decision to do that. But at the time, I wasn’t the happiest with studying journalism because I really wanted to do creative writing with English, but a lot of people, counselors and whatnot said, “Oh, we don’t think you should study English because that’s not going to be good for going into a career.” [00:07:22] SY: I know you went to Howard University.

[00:07:24] RD: Yes.

[00:07:25] SY: And they have an excellent journalism program. I almost went to Howard, actually.

[00:07:28] RD: Yes. It’s an amazing program, but very, very rigorous. And so what’s so interesting about doing that program is by the time I was done, I said, “Oh my God, I absolutely do not want to be a journalist.” [00:07:43] SY: Oh, no! Why? What’s your job about it?

[00:07:49] RD: I enjoyed interacting with people. I enjoyed interviewing people. The amount of background research that you have to do, the amount of just really finding that good story and pitching that good story and then finding the angle that will truly work to tell that story, it was a lot and I wasn’t the most interested in it. And then one of the other things, I think one of the reasons that Howard has such an amazing journalism program is because you are expected to write a lot. We had to write 15 to 20 articles a week.

[00:08:31] SY: Oh my goodness!

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