In this week's podcast, I interview Saron about her childhood, and her winding path into tech as an adult.
Saron moved from Ethiopia to the US as a child. Her parents had high standards for her academics, and they would even make up extra homework for her each night.
After studying liberal arts, Saron worked in science journalism. Eventually she decided to learn to code. After some self-study, she attended a coding bootcamp. From there, she got her start as a developer at ThoughtBot, and then worked at Microsoft.
Saron founded CodeNewbie in 2014 and started hosting Twitter chats for people who were interested in learning to code. Then she launched the CodeNewbie podcast, which now has more than 200 interviews with developers around the world.
Even though Saron is extremely productive, this productivity doesn't come easy. She talks about was recently diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder and General Anxiety Disorder, and she has adapted to her situation by being extremely methodical about how she invests her time and energy.
This interview is a 2 hour listen in your favorite podcast player app - just search "freecodecamp" and you should find it.
If you have an Amazon Echo, you can just say "Alexa - play the freeCodeCamp podcast."
Or you can listen to it right here in your browser.
Also, in 2017, Saron created a conference in New York City for new developers called Codeland. The conference aims to be as inclusive as possible.
You can read about my Codeland experience here.
And you can get tickets to the 2019 July 22nd Codeland conference here.