**1.	Why are you interested in programming? What have you done to expose yourself to programming so far?**

I grew up in the 70’s in southern California, and I remember my first exposure to programming – punchcards for a huge, building-sized computer. I was about nine years old and it blew me away – I loved telling the machine to print out ASCII images, and I started thinking right away of all the amazing things I could do with a computer.

Of course, home computers were a few years off at that point, and I moved to a very rural town of 2000 people in 1981. I had no access to coding anymore until my father purchased a TRS-80 a year later. I immediately taught myself Basic and started working on making a game like Zork.

Shortly after the Commodore 64 came out, I won a place on the cover of Commodore Power/Play magazine for my digital art submission. I was 16.

My first real opportunity had come to enter into the tech field… and I let it go, as I was being asked to move away from my family to New York to work for computer companies due to the magazine exposure, but I felt I was too young to do it - even though my parents would have found a way to let me.

Around that time, I taught my best friend to code in Basic and he went off to OIT and then Microsoft in the 90’s, and created Sonic Foundry. I was frankly discouraged from applying to OIT by my career counselor in High School, and I had a lot of respect for adult opinion with no idea at the time how gender assumptions played into it; so I went to Eastern Oregon University.

Still, the interest would not go away, and I was the only person in my entire dorm building with a personal computer (the Amiga 500). I took a class in Fortran with the idea that I could finally get into the computer field…

…and then EOU shut down its nascent Computer Sciences degree because they thought it was a gimmick for nerds with no future, and they wanted to use the money for the football program. I was told that my interest would not lead to actual work, so I chose to become a historian.

After all, I thought; these people must be right. I need a career that is time-tested, will always be needed, and doesn’t require you to relearn what you know every other year.

That’s three misses, in case you are counting.

No matter what job I had from then on, I was always choosing to take over the computer work, which became more and more important as the years passed; however, I never had the chance to just sit down and learn current code. I’ve done digital artwork, spreadsheets, social media, and Google Analytics.

My exposure to code for years consisted of breaking into it when I had to, looking at patterns, finding the one or two things I needed to change, and making minor code alterations on projects I was doing. I’ve tinkered with just about every code platform at some time or another, but I never learned how to just write it from scratch beyond Basic.

My generation was definitely one of transition from analog to digital, and I was always off by just a few years here and there, or in the wrong place at the wrong time, or simply allowed myself to be influenced away from becoming a coder. Very few people knew how important a field it was going to be, and I did not have the encouragement that new generations have (and frankly, men had even back then) in entering the field.

I feel that finally, my time has come to be the coder I was always meant to be. As they say, it’s not how many times you fall down, but how many times you get back up. At this point in my life, I am not going to be deterred by anything – or anyone. It’s more than obvious to me that this was always meant to be my career field and I am done with allowing anything to stop me.
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**2.	If you are accepted into our program, where do you see your career in 5 years?**

I would love to become as proficient as possible in coding within teams, and in team structure and management, so that I can become a project manager. I’ve worked for project managers in other fields that had very little understanding of what their teams actually did, and they were more of a hindrance than a help.

I intend to be a very different kind of manager – one that actually helps the team work better together than alone, and boosts instead of destroys morale. I have always been attracted to the role of mentor and often serve in that capacity. I would love to help junior coders, especially those who have not had the guidance and encouragement that others might have, to create solid careers for themselves.

Working with numbers and flow charts and analytical thinking makes me happy, so I assume that will be a baseline perk for whatever development job I get after completion, but managing teams would add even more satisfaction from a career perspective.
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**3.	After reading Ada's Vision, Mission and Inclusivity Statement, how will you contribute to Ada's vision for an inclusive and diverse community?**

There are many aspects of inclusion that come to mind when I consider the tech industry, so I’ll start with a little background.

I was the first person in my county to get a modem back in the 80’s, and started interacting online since the first BBS’s and even before Compuserve was a Thing. At first I was very open about who I was, which was met with absolute disbelief that I could be female and online, which led to requests for ‘proof’, which led to stalkers.

My online presence switched to be ‘male’ from about 1992 until I was doxxed in 2011. It was a method of defense at the time, but it opened my mind to gender issues that I had no idea existed. You see, my parents raised me in as gender-neutral a fashion as possible for that era, and I truly did not know that I was being treated differently – and that I, personally, was treating people differently, based on gender.

My experience as a ‘man’ for so many years showed me that men are taken more seriously, period. My degree was not questioned. My general knowledge about anything was not questioned. The fact that I almost always ended up in online community leadership positions was not questioned. My logical thinking patterns were accepted as normal for ‘my gender’. Once I had exposure to the feeling that my mind was valued without caveat, I became addicted to it and really disliked most of my real-world interactions by comparison.

There was more to the complex world of gender interaction online than just male privilege and misbehavior, and one of the things I had to confront was how strongly women enforced gender policing. It raised a giant mirror to my own practices.

These days, I no longer have a separate world where I have male privilege, and frankly, I don’t want to have it anymore. I want all people to be treated according to their actual qualities, not stereotypical constructs. Everyone deserves that level of respect and I know by direct experience what the difference feels like.

My experience has also made me more sensitive to anyone on the gender fringes and spectrum, and I have many transgender and gender-queer friends that defy labels. I am constantly practicing the use of their desired pronouns and use them in front of others; when I’m asked why I use certain words about people, I take it as a chance to explain not only alternate gender terminology, but to make a stand for its normalcy.

I love to have chances to pave that way in daily life.

Tech is still a place that is considered “white-cisgender-male” by default, and on top of that, values youth over age. I hope that I can take on a position of authority in the field eventually so that I can serve as an example for women and older workers in general, and can help reshape team cultures by direct intervention.

Already, I’ve been told that my determination to reinvent myself and do what I’ve always wanted to do is inspiring others who want to change career fields, but thought they’d never be accepted. I hope to continue to serve as an inspiration, and to find ways to reach a wider audience; perhaps with my years of experience in social media, I can provide a loud voice that countless others can hear.

It would be quite a switch from being an anonymous male online, to a very public female with nothing to hide.
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**4.	Tell us about a time you made a mistake that you learned a lot from. If you encountered the situation again, what would you do differently?**

I was a program manager in my historian days, and I managed a lot of staff and volunteers. Seasonal workers were a big part of our tourist season, and that season could be brutal in terms of workload, high stress, and long hours.

We had some issues with workers coming late, or not giving enough notice to fill their position for the day if they were going to be absent, and it would cause terrible burdens for the remaining staff. As I was discussing this problem with the CEO, I offhandedly suggested that any person who does not give us notice of absence should be terminated on the spot.

He agreed.

The next day, a good friend of mine who had given much of his time and energy while working there, turned up late and said his family had dropped in and so he couldn’t stay.

There I was, trapped by this thing I had decided without much deep contemplation; if I didn’t follow through, people would think I was just protecting a friend. If I did, I would lose a friend and someone who generally brought a great deal of energy and hard work to the workplace.

In the end, I had to let him go; I lost the friend, and we had a terrible time rehiring someone to take his place. The person we did hire was not nearly of the same quality.

I learned never again to make procedural decisions so lightly. Now I imagine every outcome I can think of, the mitigating circumstances, and how it would play out in the real world with real people.

If that situation arises again, I would have to find a more incremental way to address the problem. Firing a useful worker is never the best first action. In this case, I could have told him to make up the lost day by doing a day of early prep to help out his fellow workers next week, and I would have reminded him about how hard it was on everyone to suddenly be a man short.

I am quite sure he would have responded to both measures, and it would have been better both for him and the rest of the workplace.