Becoming a Black Female Coder

I’ve always been a quirky girl with geeky interests. I was never the outdoorsy type growing up; I spent my time being captivated by a tv show, lost in a book or wrapped up in a video game (to my dismay, my expert level Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater skills did not serve me well at all when I once tried to go down my driveway on an actual skateboard. I stuck to virtual activities after that.) I was that girl who had a spare reading flashlight under her pillow and who cried when her parents uninstalled Doom from the family computer claiming that it was “too violent” for an 8 year old (lies). Even with that background, though, my decision to switch majors to Computer Science during the end of my sophomore year in undergrad still managed to shock all of my friends and family.

At the time, I had been roaming liberal arts limbo, trying to figure out what fit me and what felt right. I found myself deeply interested in my Africana Studies classes but wanted to couple that with something else. I had taken a job doing student tech support and discovered that I loved working with computers. It just felt right to me. By the end of my sophomore year, I had to declare a major. Taking a huge leap of faith, I declared a Computer Science major without having taken any prior classes in it and hoped for the best. Luckily for me, it turned out to be the best decision I ever made. As I progressed throughout my studies, however, it became increasingly more apparent to me the lack of black people, and especially black women, in the development community. It didn’t sit right with me.

I am fortunate to have found a few from my classes who I remain in contact with but I always knew there were more out there that I wanted to connect with. I started BlackFemaleCoders as a way for me to share my experiences, the good and the bad, that I have dealt with while being in the field. Through it, I wanted to be able to connect with other women like me and provide a place for them to share their own experiences. The goal is for BlackFemaleCoders to become a space for us to make our presence known both to each other and to the rest of the tech community and to highlight the awesome things we are working on while also providing guidance and support to each other when we need it. I started BlackFemaleCoders because I remember feeling incredibly isolated while trying to carve my own path in the field and my hope is that through this blog (and the upcoming initiatives I have planned) and through forming a strong network, I can prevent another BlackFemaleCoder from having to experience that same isolation.