I was born in a log cabin, with no running water and no electricity, in Alaska.
There's no roads to Barrow; you can't even drive there.
When we lived up in the, in the native village, people didn't go into technology. It wasn't
something that kids in high school were talking about as, as a potential thing to do.
I knew early on: education is how I progress.
My family didn't know a lot about education; no one in my family had gone to college.
I went to community college. I was then able to transfer to Stanford, which was an amazing opportunity,
and I'm able to say I got a degree from Stanford. I got straight A's all the way through Stanford,
and I paid for it by myself.
I feel very lucky in the technology space to have the flexibility that I have in my role.
I'm able to work remotely, I'm able to work from home, I'm able to work any time of day or night
and that produces a huge amount of flexibility in being able to be present and effective
at my job, and be present and effective for my family. I think when people think about developing,
they think about sitting down and typing out long lines of code, and people look at that and they go,
"Well, I can't do that," but it's really not all of it. That there are platforms like FileMaker,
where you can interact with it. If you're a logical thinker, if you're a critical thinker, if you know how to
solve problems, you can code--you really can! It's there, the platforms are there for you.
So, I think that that concept of low code and helping people understand, helping women understand
what that means, really does help to lower that barrier to entry.
I would love for women who are in these remote areas--like I was as a child--
to know that it's accessible.
So, I would say to a woman looking at this as, I would say, "You can do this. There are women here
who want to support you and who are here for you. Please come join us."