Ksenia Nadkina (she/her)

Generally, I work on tasks and features. This means that my lead will assign work to be done for the software to behave a certain way and I will write the code to make it work that way. Then the program will undergo through testing. In this phase, someone will try to "break it" and if they don't succeed the code is flagged as good to be added to the program. That's how your favorite software gets updated!

I normally write programs in languages such as JavaScript and Python. I also use additional tools made for developers. One of these tools is a code editor called VSCode. I also use programs to communicate with your computer on a much deeper level. Other than that software development is one of those low-bar-to-entry professions. In a nutshell all you need is a computer and a strong wi-fi connection. Having a great, easy-to-talk-to team is so important. I need to communicate with my colleagues a lot. This has increased now that we’re in a distributed and remote setting.

We solve problems in a team setting. As a result, easy and smooth communication is essential. Think of writing code as the way we create features in software. Analytical and computational thinking to break big problems into smaller manageable chunks. This is a skill that each software developer generally acquires during school. We use this skill to make decisions about how the software will behave in the long term. For example, imagine how a traffic light switches color. In theory, it’s a simple program. Light red for a few seconds, light orange, then green and create a loop. But there are many questions that have gone into creating such a simple algorithm. How long should each light be on? How long should the green blink? What should happen in case of an outage? These non-trivial questions had to be asked and resolved for such a program as traffic light control to work properly. And the decisions to create that program had to be made as a team!