#168 From Accountant to Data Engineer with Alyson La
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not everyone is going to be nice. There's going to be mean people in the world. Because when I entered my career, I was so naive and I was this girl from Utah and I just thought everyone was just like nice and da, da, da. But in the corporate world,

People are mean and they have like agendas and they have like political maneuvers that they're trying to do to get to where they want to be in the corporate world. And I just was so naive to that. So I would tell my younger self, just know.

that not everyone is nice and you're going to encounter some mean people and just kind of like mentally prepare for that. Welcome back to the free code camp podcast, your source for raw unedited interviews with developers. Today we're talking with Alison law. She taught herself how to code using free code camp while working as an accountant at GitHub and was able to transition into a data scientist role there and ultimately became a data engineer.

After one of Allison's kids got diagnosed with autism, she left her career for three years to be a full-time mom. She then re-entered the workforce and now teaches other moms how to do the same through a charity called Tech Moms. Recently, Allison won a Teacher of the Year award, and she was a top five finalist in a recent data visualization competition.

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this week's musical intro with yours truly on drums guitar bass and keys we're going back to 1990 with super nintendo f0 mute city alison welcome to the free code camp podcast thanks great to be here

Yeah, I am thrilled that we're able to talk with you because you're somebody who has inspired me a lot. Like I've enjoyed learning more about you and the work you're doing to help moms reenter the workforce, especially improving their technical skills and potentially working as data scientists, data analysts or developers themselves.

Maybe you could talk a little bit about how you've been helping moms through tech moms and some of the ways you've been helping them jumpstart their software development skills.

Yeah, absolutely. So Tech Moms is a charity based in Utah. And over the time that it's been around since 2020, it's helped over 500 moms upskill in data, I should say, in software development and front end web development skills. And it's really a career tour of different jobs available in tech, whether that's UX, UI, software engineering, data analytics.

So I came on board last year and I developed the curriculum for their data analytics and AI course. And it's a 16-week course where the women learn. We start with Excel and then we go to SQL and then we learn all these different BI tools. And then also recently we introduced AI tooling to help women understand how to use AI tools in this new landscape. Yeah, and BI is business intelligence, which is kind of like an area of data analytics.

Yeah. So dashboarding, business intelligence, any large company will have a business intelligence tool where they connect with their data warehouse and they have a visualizations to be able to report on the different metrics of the different products across the business lines.

Awesome. Well, maybe you can talk a little bit about how you've been using AI to help your learners because a lot of them are coming in with probably negligible technical skills and you've been able to help a lot of them get up and running quite quickly. Yeah. So the background of the moms in our community,

tech moms group are about 50% of them are their head of household. So they're single, single moms and about 40% of them have a household income of less than $50,000. So there are women that really need to upskill to be able to provide for themselves and their families. Um,

And one way that we're doing it in my semester at Tech Moms this time around is I'm teaching them about AI tooling, which is not just ChatGPT. We use ChatGPT. And what I teach is using ChatGPT as a tutor. So as people are learning to code, it's not just asking questions.

for the answers. It's asking for help how to figure out the assignments. And so we kind of use ChatGPC as a tutor and use ChatGPC as a coach to

in our class. And then in addition to that, I have introduced AI coding tools like Lovable and Bolt and V0 and Replit, which are these basically AI agents that through natural language you can type in and get a website. And by connecting to Supabase, you get a full application. And I think what that does is that helps them understand the full stack of how the data flows

When they are analyzing the data, when you have an application and it's attached to a database, you need to analyze that data in the database. And so it's been really fun showing them these tools. I've gotten super hooked on these tools. And I'd love to share one example of one of the ways one of the students is using it.

So one of my students, Quincy, she had this idea for a website. Her name is Quincy? Yeah, her name is Quincy. Yeah, very cool. Always excited to hear about a fellow Quincy.

Quincy's awesome because she had this idea for a website she wanted to make in order to create a petition to revitalize her local park in her neighborhood that's been neglected. And she's had this idea for quite some time. But when I introduced these AI tools, she was able to, in one night, make a website that included a back end to a database where people could enter their name on a petition.

And she posted it on LinkedIn, she posted on her local Facebook, on her Facebook and different local Facebook groups. And within a week, she received over 200 signatures on her petition and got an introduction to her city council to be able to start the process to revitalize this park. And this is all thanks to AI coding tools, because the concept of creating a website from scratch is a little bit overwhelming.

And she was able to do it super quickly and just get that momentum to get this project rolling. That's awesome. So using AI tools is kind of like just an accelerator of actually seeing the power of these tools. Because, I mean, that's like a pretty amazing anecdote. She was able to have an actual impact. Hopefully she'll go on to succeed in getting this park revitalized. And a large part of it is just being able to quickly stand up a website where she can gather signatures. Yeah.

Yeah. Not even just a website, a full stack app that's connected to a database. And, uh, that would usually take, you know, a whole course or a bootcamp or something like that to be able to understand how to create a full stack web app. And she was able to do it in a day. And, uh, and

And so I just think, yeah, it just accelerates the speed of being able to accomplish things. Yeah, right on. Well, that's very cool that you're teaching these AI tools in addition to everything else you're teaching. And I want to talk a little bit more about your background because I think it's just absolutely fascinating. Like you went from accountant to data analyst to data scientist, right?

to software engineer. And along the way, you got some incredible income increases. And because you were at GitHub, my understanding is you were in a very good place to be able to get a pretty big chunk of stock to essentially have kind of like

a reserve fund for your family. Uh, so yeah, it sounds like you, you've had a really exciting career and you come from relatively humble origins. I understand like your dad's a truck driver. Yeah.

Yeah. So my dad, uh, spent the latter part of his career as a truck driver because he actually worked in yellow page sales. So I don't know about the audience if they know what the yellow pages are, but it's kind of like what's going on in AI right now, where it's like some jobs you just, they won't be around anymore, but the yellow pages were this big book, uh,

And you used to flip through them to find phone numbers, but he sold ads in the Yellow Pages and then that industry went away and he became a truck driver. And so he did that and I've got four siblings, so five kids in my family, including myself.

And I was the first one to graduate college with a four-year degree. And I went on to get a start in tech. And I knew that I needed to be financially independent because I couldn't ask my parents for money. Yeah. Well, talk about your college experience. You studied accounting? What did you study? No. In college, I actually studied religious studies and business. It was like a dual major. Okay.

And I did that because an early job that I had, there was a manager that had a history degree and his philosophy was, uh, you can just study anything you want. And then when, once you're in the business world, you do a good job and you can just do anything that you want in the business world. You don't need a business degree. Yeah. So I would, I would coast on that advice. Like, um,

You don't need to necessarily have a background in these things. These are all things that you can learn. I do encourage people to go get a degree because once you have the degree, you check the box on the HR or like the applicant tracking software or something like that. But what your degree is in is much less relevant than what your actual skills are. So you were able to kind of get more of like a liberal arts broad perspective.

background and then combine that with some basic business skills that you probably picked up undergrad. But what did you do from there? Did you seek any formal accounting certification or anything like that? No. So I got my start. I moved to San Francisco with $400 in my bank account and a dream. And that dream was to work part-time as a tax person because I just wanted to

work in a job where I could only work 10 weeks a year and then I wanted to travel. So anyway, I got to San Francisco and I ended up doing taxes for a company that also did bookkeeping for a small startup at the time called GitHub. And so that's how I got my start in the tech world was just doing bookkeeping for startups in San Francisco. Wow. Of all the startups you could do booking for, that's a very auspicious one. Yeah.

Yeah. And then from there, that's how my career unfolded really was that I was doing bookkeeping for GitHub. They needed an in-house full-time accountant as they were growing and

And I was asked to come on board as a full-time accountant. And at that time, when I came on board as a full-time accountant at GitHub, I had never seen code before. I didn't know what a repository was. I didn't know anything about the world of coding. But I was there at GitHub, and I was so curious because everyone was talking about code all the time that I just started asking questions and trying to understand how to use GitHub, first of all, like what's a pull request and all of these kind of terminology. What's a fork?

And then I learned how to use GitHub. I learned how to read code in repositories. I started copying repositories or forking them, changing them. And eventually I became known as the accountant who codes because I would just make projects and do things like I would go to hackathons.

As an accountant. And at that time, yeah, internally, I just became known as this accountant that codes. And eventually they asked me to be on the engineering team. Wow. They asked you. So, uh,

I talk a lot about pivot jobs and stuff like that. And usually people are applying themselves. They're like talking to their supervisor. They're like, Hey, I'd really like to work as a developer. If I can look at my, you know, GitHub repo, look at some of the, look at my portfolio. Like I'm, I'm ready. Put me in coach. Yeah. But this was like, I guess your skills had advanced to the point where they were, they were approaching you. Yeah. And I think that's advice for anyone is that, um,

When I was doing accounting, I really wanted to be a CPA. I was on that track and I didn't actually want to be a developer at all. But I kept on making websites and sharing them. And so it's kind of like this accidental branding that I gave myself. So when folks are doing courses on Free Code Camp, I think the most important part of being a learner is also sharing what you're doing and sharing your projects.

And so that's what worked for me was just putting my projects out there, posting them on Twitter, posting them internally. And then people then became, uh, started associating me with doing code related work. Yeah. And how are you like learning coding? Because one does not simply learn to code, right? It is like a pretty challenging endeavor. There's a tremendous amount that you have to learn. Yeah. How did you go about that? Um,

So for me, it was I worked with so many engineers that any chance I had to talk to an engineer at my work, I would just sit down with them and ask them questions.

to help me with a project and everyone was so willing to help me. Like I remember when I first set up my dot files. So dot files are like your internal system where you can designate in your terminal kind of special things that your terminal does. And I hadn't, I didn't know what they were. And so an engineer that I was just kind of like sitting next to at lunch, uh, explained to me what dot files were and helped me set them up.

And, yeah, so that's how I got started was just asking anyone and everyone that I knew that was an engineer at my company just for, like, 30 minutes of their time to show me, like, to help me on something. And all of those, like, times that helped me.

Added up. And then I also use Free Code Camp because when I got started, it was back in the day. And so, yeah, I just remember when Free Code Camp was coming out. So this is like circa 2013 and 2014 that time. Any resources I could find, I used Free Code Camp. I used Code Academy, all of those things to just do project-based learning. And then also,

My hack is, again, like I mentioned before, just forking repositories and editing the code in the forked repositories to change it to do what I wanted to do. And a lot of it was front end facing things so I could show people a website that I had completed. Yeah.

Yeah. So if I can recap some of your advice there, first of all, there's a saying, the squeaky wheel gets the grease and you were very much like putting yourself out there asking for help from the devs at your office. So anybody who's working at a company who has developers, like even if you're like a bank, a hospital system, anything, there are probably some developers that work somewhere. See if you can find those people and be like, Hey, uh, you know, you, can I do some pair programming with you? Or like, like how would you approach a dev? Yeah.

Like giving your cold approach when you're asking for help. So it would be, I'm working on this project and I'm stuck on something. Can you help me? Engineers love to help people when they're stuck because they like to figure things out, right? Yeah, it's all about problem solving. Yeah, it's all about problem solving. So I would get stuck...

on a project that I was on and I would try to find my nearest dev to ask him to help me get unstuck. And that's how I would approach it if I was someone. So be working on something, be working on a project and then just ask someone for help if you can. Yeah. Awesome. That's super helpful. So, um,

The other thing you were doing, of course, was leveraging online learning resources that were free and available and high quality. And once you were doing that, putting stuff out there, like you said that you were very, I guess, fearless in terms of subjecting your relatively neophyte skills, like letting people see the things you were building, recombining other people's

Free Code Camp, a lot of people may not realize this, but I started with the Hackathon boilerplate. I didn't want to go in and do basic node route wiring and all that stuff, so I just grabbed this popular wireframe. It was a popular...

Uh, and I still had to learn, you know, no JS and learn express. And, uh, I believe he used MongoDB and we still use that stack to a large extent. We've migrated the TypeScript. We use, um, a lot of, you know, fancier stuff like single page application type stuff, uh, react and things like that. But at the, at the core, a lot of the authentication, a lot of the displaying the different, you know, pages and stuff like that, like that routing, uh,

was handled by this boilerplate. And you don't necessarily have to start from scratch. You don't have to start typing your HTTP header at the very top or anything like that. You can just dive right in, right? And it sounds like the fact that you were working at GitHub, you were probably more aware of this culture of forking than a lot of people would have been at the time because you were steeped in it, right? That was what your company did. Your company literally invented...

the pull request. Yes, exactly. Yeah. So one of the first projects that I did actually was a Drake, the rapper fan page back in the day, I was a big Drake fan. So I used bootstrap, you know, bootstrap, the like front end template. Um, fun fact, I onboarded with the creator of bootstrap. We onboarded on the same day.

And I just thought that was cool because I didn't know who he was. But in kind of the developer world, he's very prolific and popular. And he helped me set up my computer on my first day. And then later on, he had offered to help me if I ever wanted to do a bootstrap project.

So I created this bootstrap fan page of Drake and I embedded a SoundCloud playlist and I created like a JavaScript button at the bottom that was like Drake me, which would pop up a Drake quote. And so I just started with doing projects that were fun to me and yeah, using boilerplate, you know, templates that were readily available and then just editing them.

Yeah. Very cool. So, uh, following your interest, uh, essentially and, and just building what you're interested in building, you didn't necessarily have to build like some sort of enterprise tool for like a local business that was, you know, freelancing with you. You could just go out and build whatever you wanted. Yeah. Yeah.

Mark Otto. Is that the person you're talking about? Yeah. So fun story about me and Mark Otto. Uh, I was learning to code right around the same time that you were. And I was, uh, hitting up like a lot of hackathons and things like that. And I think Mark Otto was like a judge at a hackathon or a speaker or something like that. And I remember I was so intimidated by him. Um,

He had an entourage with him, right? Like all these other people probably from GitHub or open source contributors to the Bootstrap project. And I remember just standing there. They were in a big circle and I stood there, but I was too intimidated to say anything. So I just stood there and nodded and like, oh, I'm right here with Mark Otto. This is cool. I know. Yeah.

I know. And he's such a nice guy, like exceptionally nice. And it was really eye opening to me because when I was just like getting my computer on my first day at GitHub as an accountant, he who I knew was introduced as a designer, he was in the terminal helping me set up

different programs for my computer. And that was just interesting to me because I thought designers didn't work in the terminal. And so that was my first introduction that there's this idea of kind of like a full stack designer and they're actually developers also. Yeah, it used to be like a meme that if you could find somebody who's a designer and a developer, you'd found like a unicorn and you definitely needed to hire them right away. But I think nowadays...

most designers I know can, and can certainly do basic web development. And, and they're probably also using tools like framer and things like that to quickly iterate. Um, so I want to talk about this transition because that is a big deal to transition from working as an accountant to working as a developer. What was your early experience like as

as a dev working. And my understanding is you went straight into like data science and data analytics, which is definitely more in the area you're comfortable with like numbers. Yeah. Can you talk about that, that transition in the series of pivots that ultimately got you to the software engineer role? Sure. So starting in accounting and again, it was finding projects in accounting that were kind of like out of scope. And so as an accountant, I created a dashboard in Tableau, um,

because I had access to all the payroll information about all of the gender kind of gaps in our company. So I was able to create a dashboard of like the percentage of men versus women in each of the different departments. And so that helped me become known a little bit as a data analyst. And so I kind of got poached by another team. And again, it was...

Moving to the engineering team at GitHub, but I did have one specific person that was my major advocate. So for folks that are looking to make a transition, being able to have someone that's like a sponsor, what they sometimes call it, that's just really rooting for you. So I had that. I had one person that was like, you should come over and do this over on the engineering side. So they brought me over. I got a nice pay bump at that time. I...

went from making a base salary of 70,000. I had gotten an increase as an accountant at 90,000. And then my first data analyst salary was 112,000. Wow. So like right there, like 22 K bump from changing jobs. Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome.

So it was really exciting. It was my first, uh, like six figure job. So that was like a big milestone for me for sure. Yeah. And you are of course living in San Francisco at the time, which is very expensive, like maybe the most expensive place to live in the United States. Um, so that doesn't necessarily mean that you had like the Lambo mansion. Right. But, uh,

Let's talk a little bit about that advice you gave because I think it bears repeating. So finding an internal champion, somebody who can champion you and say, oh yeah, look out for this Allison. She's going places. She's learning very quickly. And so having somebody that was advocating for you to be able to... She's ready for this role. Yeah, absolutely. That made the whole difference because that person...

basically created the job description for me to be able to move over. And so I moved over and I began doing data analysis. And the transition there was I was mostly working in spreadsheets before. And as a data analyst, I had to learn SQL for the first time. I had never written SQL. So my main job in transitioning to data analytics was learning how to access the database, write SQL, and then I would get data.

enough data where I would actually export it to a spreadsheet. So I was working in spreadsheets again, but I had to access the database, write SQL in order to retrieve the data and then analyze it from there. So that was the kind of skill transfer was from Excel to SQL. Yeah. Yeah. And SQL is incredibly useful and I cannot recommend enough that everybody should

learns how to actually write the queries, not just rely on LLMs to generate the queries. I think it is one of those fundamental skills that's just not going to change too much going forward. It's a pretty mature technology. And once you take time to wrap your head around it,

what's happening with the tables and the joins and all that stuff, that is a skill that will serve you very well. I took the Jennifer Wisdom. I can't remember her last name, but she's a teacher at Stanford and

And she had this awesome database course and I took it and that's how I learned about like all the normal forms and how to query databases and stuff like that. And like, that was only a few, maybe like a dozen, a few dozen hours. Like I, I took the course and I actually like took the exam at the end, uh, and everything, but it was just like a free online course. But like that has reaped so much reward that a tiny investment of maybe like

30 hours or something. And now I understand a lot of that stuff. And of course it still gets rusty, but like I can go back to it and get a refresher and resurface a lot of those skills. What were some other skills? So you were mainly working doing, you know,

Data analysis, like taking the data out of the database, putting it into spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are like the workhorse of a lot of the world economy. I think people sleep on spreadsheets. Yes, Matt.

Would you agree? The world is run on Excel. Yeah, the world runs on Excel. All businesses eventually filter down to an Excel spreadsheet, which then they give to their accountant to do their taxes. The whole world is run on Excel. So I think Excel is a good skill to learn your way. And I've actually switched to Google Sheets, but same concept of spreadsheets.

And then the concept of if you know how to use a spreadsheet and understand the idea of maybe doing like an X lookup to kind of go between tables and look things up, that's a similar concept to SQL joins. So those concepts translate over. And then from there I got into BI tooling. So again, business intelligence tooling where instead of me pulling SQL queries and analyzing it in a spreadsheet, we're able to connect the database to this like front end tool.

and visualize and track metrics over time. And there is, there's some engineering and some SQL and some like understanding of joins and concepts like that. But once you get it into the front end dashboard, then it's in the hands of like product managers that then can use the data to make decisions on if their product is doing well or how many users they have or the engagement or the retention, all that stuff.

Yeah. So essentially your role to a large extent in the data analysis was not necessarily to analyze the data yourself, but to surface the salient features of those data and get them in the hands of a manager who was going to use those data to make decisions. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Well, I'm excited to talk a little bit more about your journey through GitHub because you continue to expand your skills and become increasingly technical during your time there. I want to hurry up and get through that because I'm really excited to talk about your family and how you left the workforce and how you reentered it and how you're helping other people do the same. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So from being a data analyst, I got a promotion to be a data scientist and

The difference between those are just a title. I was still doing the same work. And when my manager gave me the promotion to data scientist, she just said, I want you to have the title data scientist because it has a bigger pay band. I was like, thanks. I appreciate that. So I got another champion. Absolutely.

So I got a salary bump and a title bump to data scientist. And then my last position was technically a software engineer, and that was because I was doing data engineering work at that time of working in a tool called Airflow. That's an orchestrator tool that helps move data from the data warehouse, make like a different ETL process, which is another kind of word. Extract, transform, load.

That's right. So it's helping extract, transform, and load the data and then orchestrate, creating different tables that then can be used by the end user. So my last role at GitHub was data engineer, software engineer, doing those type of tasks. Yeah. And real quick before we move on from data engineering, what do you think the main skills that people...

should be interested in if they want to get into data engineering today. And I'm not sure if you like follow the state of the art and there may be like a newfangled tools, but like in general, if somebody is interested in data engineering, which a lot of people write and they're like, Hey, I want to get into data engineering. Uh, what are the things that you think that they should probably focus on if they wanted to be working a job like the one that you were working at

Yeah. So SQL all day, every day, understanding how to use SQL and write SQL is super important. There's a tool called DBT, which I think is kind of up and coming and not even up and coming. It's really popular currently. So understanding how to use that tool. And I would say Python, there's some like Python scripting involved.

So, yeah, I think baseline though, SQL, understanding how to use SQL and, and then, yeah, see if there's some courses around using Airflow or dbt. Those are the main tools that I use. And, and this might be a little bit controversial among like data, actual data engineers that are listening to this because there's two different types of roles here.

in this kind of discipline. There's a data engineer, which is really like moving the data from place to place, like helping with the data pipelines. But the second role, which is becoming more popular, is called an analytics engineer, which is once you have the data in a place where you can use it, this analytics engineer is creating what's called a semantic layer, where it's transforming these tables from raw data into usable tables that can then be used

fed to the dashboards. So I think a really, really interesting role that's becoming more popular is an analytics engineering role. And it's like the bridge between being a data engineer and an analyst. That's interesting. So it's kind of like...

The role has bifurcated and now there's kind of like the first part and then there's the second part. And those are specializations kind of like a front-end developer versus a back-end developer or something like that. Yeah. The analytics engineering role is super interesting because it's just transforming the raw data so that it can be used better on the front end. And yeah, it's more of a specialized role. Yeah.

That is a bridge. Yeah. Awesome. That's super helpful. And anybody who's interested in data engineering, rest assured, FreeCodeCamp has a lot of courses on some of these topics and a lot more are coming. It is an area that we are prioritizing, helping people learn. So you'll probably be able to find lots of courses on that here on YouTube. If you're listening or if you're listening in the audio form, I'm going to talk with a lot more data engineers. You can definitely listen to me interview a lot of data scientists.

So enough of a break for a little break to publicize free code camp and the resources we're putting out there. I want to talk about the past few years. So you are a mother. Your kids are actually the same exact age as mine, which makes me think that like you and I, like it's, it's really interesting. Like you learned to code around the same time that I was learning to code. Like I was maybe just a few years ahead of you. And then, you know, you, you started your family. Like,

There are a lot of parallels and it's really exciting to talk with somebody else who's gone through this. Um,

You had, can you talk about like the sequence of having kids? Cause there are going to be a lot of parents listening to this and I kind of want to contextualize that for them. Yeah, absolutely. So I had both my kids while I was working at gab and get hub at the time offered excellent parental leave. So for my first child, I had four months parental leave fully paid. And then my second child, I had five months parental leave fully paid. Wow.

I know it was so generous and so amazing. And then at that time, when I came back to work after my second kid, I was feeling a type of way about it. And my manager at the time was,

agreed for me to be able to come back four days a week instead of five days a week for a couple months so I could kind of make that transition a little bit easier. So being able to like talk to your manager and see if there's any flexibility in, you know, if you are getting a leave from work, being able to return to work and, you know, if you're not ready to go back full time and you're a mom there, you can ask, just ask.

If you can come back part time and, you know, they might say no, but they could say yes.

Yeah, and so they did say yes, and you came back in a four-days-a-week type capacity. And GitHub was the original remote employer. I'm sure there were other ones, but GitHub was the most famous. But they did have the HQ in San Francisco, which is awesome. And we did host a FreeCodeCamp hackathon in the actual HQ a few years ago. We had the cool Octocat statue thing. We got some photos with that. Were you working –

on that, like in that building? Yeah, I was living in San Francisco working in HQ. And I liked going into the office. But again, my team, at various points, my team has been majority remote. And so it really didn't matter if I went into the office or not, because we would just get on zoom calls and talk about what we needed to talk about. But yeah, GitHub, I think at one point, when I was doing the analysis, they were like 60% remote. And

This is between 300 all the way up to, by the time I left, there were 2,000 employees. Yeah. So you get to experience the growing pains and all the craziness that comes from 20Xing your staff. Yeah. So I was there through it all. When I was a bookkeeper, they had 30 employees.

And when I left, they had about 2000 employees. And I will mention that when I started full time, I was the 13th woman hired out of 130 employees. So about 10% women. And out of that 10% women, most of us were administrative, like we were HR, accounting, and then the 90% were male engineers. So that's when I started full time.

When I left in 2021 at about 2000 employees, I was the most tenured woman in the company. So I like to say I was a woman that had seen it all. I get him. Yeah. Literally. Yeah. And so let's talk about the reasons for leaving. Yeah. So when my first son was born, everything was great. And my second child, um,

Everything was great. And then after returning to work, we saw some kind of delays in my first child and eventually went on to get an autism diagnosis for him. And so when a young child, he was three at the time, gets an autism diagnosis, there are so many different things that need to happen as far as getting him into different therapies and speech therapy. It was delayed in his speech therapy.

So I was able to take a leave of absence at that time from GitHub where I asked for a leave of absence using what's called FMLA leave where it's job protected. Family Medical Leave Act. That's right. Yeah. So it's up to 12 weeks job protection, unpaid, but that was fine with me at the time to be able to focus on my family. So I did that and

I went back to work and I worked again for about a year, but I just realized there was a lot to juggle still. And so I eventually left the workforce and became a full-time mom caring for my

both kids and helping my son with his appointments, his speech therapy, his occupational therapy, all of that. And at that time, that's what I needed. I had worked at Gab for nine years up until that point. I needed to focus on getting my kids to a stable place. And so I took three years off of work, got my kids to a stable place. They're doing great now. And so last year I reentered the workforce and became a teacher and technical trainer for tech moms. So that was that transition. Yeah.

Awesome. So let's talk about like reentering the workforce and what that's like. That's like one of the big things you help people do is, uh, it's very common, at least in the U S uh, for when, uh, a family has a kid, like usually the woman to leave her job, if she has a job to focus on, at least for the first few years, helping the kids. And then, uh, at some point people want to go back, but, uh,

This is kind of like a luxury that people that are married and have a spouse who's able to earn enough money to keep the family afloat on a single income. Not everybody can do this. Yeah. We're a two-income society now. Yeah. A lot of people have to go back to work much earlier than they would like to and have to put their kids in daycare or something like that. Maybe you can talk a little bit about that.

how you've observed this happening for a lot of the people that you're teaching and like what, like some more typical kind of scenarios would be. Yeah. So for the women that are going through tech moms, it's really inspired, inspirational to see because they are women that are coming off of divorce. They're women that maybe have a low household income. And I'll give an example of one woman in my class who,

She left the workforce when she had her first child. She had a math undergrad. She was a stay-at-home mom for 21 years and had seven children, all daughters. And then a couple years ago, her and her husband got divorced. Seven kids.

Had not worked for 20 years because she was raising her children. And so she went through the tech moms course. She got an additional certificate at a college and is now a TA for my class. And she got a job making six figures as an analytics engineer at an aerospace company.

So it's just amazing to see what women are capable of doing. Yeah. So she came back like cold 17 years out of the workforce, but she did have a background in math, which is an important subject that I encourage lots of people to get acquainted with. That's pretty awesome. Yeah. Aerospace engineer. And she's, um, working in the aerospace engineering industry as a analytics engineer, analytics engineer. Very cool. Uh, and, and by the way, the odds of having just seven daughters, uh,

128. It's not a common thing. And that's for like kids that actually, people that actually have seven kids, which is extremely uncommon here in the United States. I think like the typical number of kids to have is like 2.5 or something like that. Nobody actually has 2.5 obviously, but between two and three. Yeah.

We have big families here in Utah. And so, yeah, you see situations where women have big families. Their marriage might not be working out and they need to return to the workforce. And so there's these stories over and over and over again of women that have made these reentries to the workforce. And it's so inspirational. And so anyone that's out there that might be facing the same thing, just know that you're not alone and there's other people

people and women that have taken long career breaks and have been able to get six figure roles in tech. That's possible. Yeah. Uh, let's talk about some of your other learners. Cause I want to hear about more of these, uh, women who are being able to reenter the workforce. Uh, maybe you could talk about like,

Typical people that are coming in and what their journey looks like in terms of how many months or years they're spending taking courses and continuing to develop their skills and what their job search looks like. Anything you could share would be super helpful for helping the audience contextualize this. Because I imagine there are a lot of moms listening to this and perhaps a lot of dads too who are in a similar situation and would like to reenter the workforce. Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. So I'll just make an aside to mention as I'm reentering the workforce now, I actually asked my husband to be a stay at home dad so that we could have one like full time parent dedicated to like running a household because that's a full time job.

So that's how I've been able to manage it. And then also we moved from San Francisco to Utah to reduce our expenses. So that's how we're able to be a one income household now. And so, you know, strategies around that are, you know, living in a lower cost of living area allow, you know, one income household. And if I can jump in real quick, I can say similarly, my wife and I, we're a one income household. And one of the reasons we moved from San Francisco is,

To Plano, Texas, which is an excellent, if you're looking for a place to move in the United States that has good public schools, good infrastructure and everything like that. Plano, like they've got so many public parks, so many different things to do. And it's like a very safe area. And it's much more economical than living in San Francisco. I distinctly remember having a conversation with a banker yesterday.

uh, trying to get a house. And they said in order to qualify for buying a house in like this area that I was looking at, like, which was not even in San Francisco, it was in like East Bay. They were like, you have to be able to prove income of over like,

$250,000 or something. I was like, what? So the decision was, okay, if we moved back to the Southwest where I'm from, like Oklahoma, then we can not stress about all those things and not spend a huge chunk of our net worth in a house that might burn down or get destroyed in an earthquake or something like that.

Yeah. Anyway, anyway, but like, I think it's very common for people to leave San Francisco and I don't think it's because San Francisco isn't a nice place. I was just there the other day, uh, judging a hackathon and giving a talk there. Like I was literally there two days ago. Um, it's still very nice, but it is extremely expensive. And if you can work remotely, then you don't necessarily have to live in San Francisco. Yeah, absolutely. And I will just, um,

Add on to that that the best career advice that I was ever given was to move to San Francisco for one year because...

San Francisco is the epicenter of tech. And so I didn't even realize that I was going to get such a jumpstart in my career by being there. I thought I was going to do accounting, but by being in, in San Francisco and having the access to all of the meetups, that's where I met you, Quincy. I invited you to a GitHub event, a GitHub universe, our conference. And it was just like those connections that you can make in San Francisco. Cause it's where so many people are. And then here we are 10 years later on a podcast together and,

So, yeah, it's like a really cool spot to be able to go and make connections. So if you're young, if you are in the position in your life where you're listening to this and you can make a move to a big city, I would definitely recommend it as a career choice to be able to get your foot in the door at a tech company. Yeah.

But that was an aside from where we started this question, which was... No, it's very relevant, important advice. I moved to San Francisco as well. I was living in SoCal, Southern California. And my wife was still working there. And I would take the Amtrak because I didn't want my wife to be without a car. Really? Yeah. Amtrak is so slow and so unreliable. I don't think I ever got to my destination by...

you know, less than two hours behind schedule. But basically, like I just take Amtrak, I crash on my friend's couch and I would just, you know, hit all the meetups and all the tech events and hackathons and stuff like that. And man, like I learned more in that

First, and I ultimately moved to San Francisco and lived there for like four years. But that first period, there was just so much intense learning and it's very difficult to simulate that online. Like being in person, surrounded by developers, going to a cafe and everybody's working on some sort of startup project and that energy is

Like you could probably get that in like Bengaluru. You might be able to get that in New York city to an extent or, um, Shanghai or, um, I like some other places that like, you might be able to get that in like certain parts of Legos, uh, just where there's like a whole lot of devs.

And the per capita developer, you know, count is like extremely high. Like I would say if you have the luxury of some savings or if you're able to like work as like a barista or something like that and move to the city and just, you know, have a bunch of roommates and stuff like that is a very good investment of your time and energy. Uh, so that, that is some unsolicited advice for anybody tuning in who doesn't have like already have kids and stuff like that. And like a lot of things,

Yeah.

And while I was there, I just went on the Luma app, which is like a new version of like meetup. And have you, have you used the Luma L U M a, I believe I have an account. I haven't actually gone to any of the events yet. Yeah. So it's kind of like what the new, like what people are using, the new thing people are using. So I went on there while I was in San Francisco and I found two developer events while I was there last week. And I just asked my husband to take the kids out to dinner. And I showed up to these developer events and,

and met a bunch of people in San Francisco. And yeah, so definitely even no matter what city you're in or what area you're in, trying to find like the closest meetup where you can meet up with other developers. We have a lot of developer groups here in Utah. When it comes to kind of being in the age of AI, one thing is that AI will never replace community. Their community will always be so important to developers.

being able to build connections. And there was a statistic that I heard recently that 70% of jobs are filled through people that the person already knows. So it's not that the job is posted online. It's just filled by someone in their network. And so being able to get out there and meet people and network is such a huge, important thing when you're

switching careers for sure. Yeah. And I'll just 100% that because if anybody hasn't read my book yet and you're listening to this, there's an audio book version of it on the podcast feed. It's episode 100. But I talk about the skills, the

The reputation, building in public and stuff, and the network. I think those are the three essential things that you need to focus on if you want to get a job. Don't over-index on skills. Don't neglect skills, of course. That is the most important, but don't neglect network. That is probably the most common neglected because people don't want to go out and have awkward conversations at meetups and stuff, but that is the way that you get it done. As you said, 70% of jobs...

They're posted, sure, but they're not necessarily filled by somebody applying through a web application. They're filled by somebody who runs into somebody at a developer meetup. It's a very common way that people get jobs. That's how I got my first developer job was through a meetup. Yeah, absolutely. And that's how I got my job with Tech Moms. I was at a networking event and I met the co-founder of Tech Moms.

And we kept in touch for a few months. And after a few months, she said, Hey, we are looking to launch this data analytics and AI class. Would you be interested in teaching it? And I said, yes. So that's how I reentered the workforce was through going to a networking event. Yeah. Well, I have a lot of questions that I just want to start firing at you if that's okay. Because I think like you're a fellow teacher, you're a dev, you're,

So one of the things that like you've invested all this time and energy learning these skills, you could still be working as like a bookkeeper or an accountant. Let's talk about like what would be if you would just stayed in that field, like where you think you would be versus where you are today. Sure. So I was on the CPA route if I were to stay in the accounting field. And what that means is I would be dealing with yearly audits of the books of like auditors coming in and then having to, you know,

Show them the financials and it's very tedious work being an accountant. And so that's part of the reason why I switched to being a developer because I just saw how much fun it was that people could just build things versus doing like monotonous, tedious things.

And yeah, I still feel like I'm like an accountant in my heart. I like run a profit and loss statement for my family and I have a balance sheet for my own family's finances. But, but also, uh, I just like to build things and make things from, and be creative. And I think programming allows me to do that. Yeah. And this is something that you've said in the past, you've said, follow your fun. Yeah. What does that mean? Like in terms of like learning the code, follow your fun.

Yeah. So just like when I mentioned when I created this like Drake bootstrap page, it was just fun to be able to do that. The other thing I created was like a matching game that pulled in the GitHub API where it showed everyone's face that was in the GitHub organization and you could match their face with their GitHub handle and their name. So that was fun to make. So it was a way to like learn everybody's names? Yeah. Yeah. It was like this matching game.

And then I just went on to do projects that were fun to me. And even to this day, I just entered a data visualization competition online where I used an AI tool to analyze Pixar data. And I stayed up way too late doing this. And I made this whole what's called a scroll story where you're scrolling through it and it takes you through all of these data visualizations and tells the story of the data.

And I just found out that I was a top five finalist in this data visualization contest. And so that was just fun to me. And then it kind of like has like rewards when you follow your fun and just do things that are interesting. Yeah. And I want to put that in perspective. You're somebody who you've already got this job teaching. Um, I, I,

I don't know how awkward it is to say this, but you're just to an extent, you're kind of set for life because of like your, um, GitHub equity and stuff like that. And like, you don't need to be sitting down and spending your spare time entering competitions and building out all these visualizations, but you're called to do it because for you, it sounds like it's a lot of fun. Is that accurate? Yeah, absolutely. Um, I, I feel like there's some level of like financial scarcity where it's like,

I want to be able to build, I want to be able to do the next thing. And I don't know if that's me founding a company or just like expanding my role as a teacher. Yeah.

But I am what I would consider an ambitious person. And so I just like to be doing things. And so recently that's been entering competitions. That's been developing my course of data analytics and AI. And yeah, I don't think I'll ever stop doing things because I just find, especially in this era right now, the AI era is so fun. Things are moving so fast and I love learning things.

And so I'll always constantly be learning until the next time I get burnt out, which will probably be in about 10 years. Yeah. Well, I want to talk about burnout, but I also want to dive a little bit into the practical considerations of...

you know, leaving your job. So maybe we can talk a little bit about burnout first. So, uh, you, of course your, your son had this auto autism diagnosis and you wanted to be able to be there and help him hit like his various development goals. And a lot of parents, they're concerned like, okay, uh, are they, you know, nth percentile for like,

you know, are they reading on time? Can, can they, can they speak properly and things like that? And with autism, one of the many things that it can cause is it takes a little bit longer for those things to manifest and you want to make sure they still manifest those capabilities, right? Yeah. Yeah. Would you say that was like a big part of it or did you, was there a period where you did get like burned out as well? Yeah, I absolutely was burnt out because like I said, I was there from essentially 30 employees to 2000 employees and,

And at GitHub, every two years, we would have management changes and reorgs. And with that much change and having to, like, play the political game that's required of being in a corporation, it's

I'm just not a political person. And like that, using that part of my brain to be able to kind of like manage, manage my manager and be able to figure out where I fit in within when it became a Microsoft company. And we had a lot of people from Microsoft coming over. I was just burnt out at that point. So when I took my break, I had to go to counseling. Honestly, I had to go see a therapist and my therapist that I talked to was

I told her I worked at GitHub and she was like, oh, I know GitHub. She had had another client that had worked at GitHub that had also dealt with burnout. Yeah. I was like, okay, it's not just me. And one of the practical pieces of advice that she gave me, which I think is really cool, is she told me to pick up a somatic hobby.

And a somatic hobby is something that you're doing with your hands. So whether that's playing guitar or like doing pottery, um, for me, it was doing cross stitching. I am a cross stitcher. And, uh, and so that's what I started doing. And I think there's just something about the way that your body physically processes emotion and being able to do something tactile was, uh, a great piece of advice that helped me kind of in my recovery from burnout. Yeah.

Yeah. And like, I'll say during the pandemic, I picked up musical musical instruments like, yeah, you know, playing the drums, guitar and like, there's just something very tactile about playing the bass and,

And it's just so soothing. So, so I can definitely, uh, cause I'm that advice too. Yeah. I agree. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, you and I are simpatico, I think is the term. I know. Same kids, Eric, kids the same age. We lived in San Francisco. We left San Francisco and we're both educators now. So yeah, it's so great to kind of like get, get to be on this podcast and share this stuff with you.

So let's talk a little bit about your preparation for leaving because there may be people out there who are, who are burned out a little bit and they are trying to take a sabbatical, which is, I mean, you're very fortunate if your company even allows you to do that. A lot of employers are like, what? You just want to quit. Okay. Maybe we'll give you your job back later. If you apply through the front door again, uh, like, like what would be some advice? And let's say, you know, uh,

Maybe like how much of a runway should people save up? What are some things that they can do to preserve their sanity while they're going through this recovery process from burnout? Yeah. So I would say there's three pieces of advice here. One is having an eight-month emergency fund. I think that's just good personal finance advice, being able to –

make enough, create enough savings to have eight months of your expenses and savings if there's an emergency. So that's what we did. We had an eight month emergency fund. And so that's part of how I was able to take this leap of absence was we had that that fund because we were still living in San Francisco. We had, you know, high expenses. So eight month emergency fund.

The other one is using FMLA leave. So I mentioned this before, but FMLA is 12 weeks job protection if you or a family member have a medical need. And so that medical need could be anxiety and depression. If you are really at your wit's end and not doing well, you can get a therapist diagnosis for anxiety and depression and you can take a job protected leave.

And then the third one is actually short-term disability. So most companies offer short-term disability, and it's similar to the FMLA leave where actually with short-term disability, if you can show that you or your family member have a medical need, you get 60% of your salary.

And what's great about short-term disability, even though it's only 60% of your salary, it is not taxed. So it kind of is, um, it makes up for not being your full salary because it's not taxed when you get it. And so this is probably effectively like about 80% of your post tax. Yeah. Yeah. So it really makes a difference. So I did those three strategies to be able to take my leave of absence. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And one question I'm sure a lot of people are going to get when they return to the workforce is like, how do you explain large gaps in your, your, I mean, obviously you were applying to an organization that is like a charity that's focused on helping moms reenter the workforce. So they're going to be much more understanding of this, but, but what do you generally advise your learners to do if an employer is like, Hey, I see that you've got like this

17 year gap. Yeah. I know. 17 year gap. Like, like how would you frame that, uh, to like, I guess, uh, explain it and like reassure the employer that it's not going to be a big deal.

So one thing that I've heard from strategies from other moms is in, if they do have a large like 20 year gap, another woman that I talked to had a nine year gap during that nine years, she had a jewelry company. And so she framed it that she was a business owner during those nine years. And she also, you know, was helping with different volunteer projects, but she didn't frame them as volunteer projects. She framed them as she was making websites for,

Because she was making, as a volunteer, she was making websites. And so being able to use what you're, it's not like you're not doing anything during that time. You're doing things. So being able to, you know, collect the things that you are doing during a career gap and say, you know, I was a Girl Scout co-leader. I was the treasurer of my PTA company.

And but generally for me, I've gone on a couple interviews since I've kind of returned to the workforce. I just say I was taking care of my family and they don't really dig into it. It's just a kind of a non-issue.

Yeah. Okay. Well, I'm thrilled to hear that it not, not being a big issue is, is a thing like, uh, some to recapitulate some of your advice. So potentially running your own small business, regardless of the scale of that business, that is something that you can do, um, potentially doing pro bono web development. Uh, and that's an opportunity to both apply your skills and, uh, just have like

experience on, and maybe if you did like half pro bono, even if you, you just had a few clients, I mean, talk about that too. And the fact that you did a whole bunch of pro bono work would only be, you know, a plus, but it could be that you're working the equivalent of like five or 10 hours a week, even doing web development on top of your parental obligations and stuff where that would help explain.

Explain the gap. There is kind of like a, I think a pretty large misconception that stay at home moms are just sitting around watching soap operas and stuff like that. That may have been the case like 30 years ago. Yeah. Bonbons. That's the other thing I always hear. But yeah, like that may have been the case like in like the 1960s, 70s, 80s. I don't know. Uh, but I can tell you that like most of the stay at home moms I know are like learning. Yeah.

Yeah. Or, you know, trying to come up with like, okay, what's next? They're working on projects. Yeah. I, when I, in my three years of staying at home, I opened my laptop maybe 10 times for me personally, because I was on the run. Like I was constantly on the go, just out and about doing things for my family. So yeah, I, I feel like the full-time moms are managing a household. They are,

There is a quote that someone in my class said that motherhood is leadership, which I love because it totally is.

is leadership because you are running a household. You are making sure that your kids have their, you know, extracurriculars scheduled. You are making sure that your kids have their, you know, field trips on the calendar and all the things that it takes to manage a household. When you're a stay-at-home mom, you're usually in charge of that and you're the household manager. And so that is so much work. And just to shout out to the moms that are doing that right now.

I see you and I know how much work it is. Yeah. Some just kind of like questions that I have because I enjoyed watching some of your talks and I understand you're like launching a YouTube channel focused around analytics and stuff like that. And I'll link to that. There may not be any videos yet, but are you still planning to publish them? Yeah. So I'm actually, uh, uh,

Putting that out this week and also starting a sub stack, Allison's AI playground. Okay, awesome. So you're talking a lot about like AI engineering, essentially like taking AI tools and using them to get things done quickly. Whether that's just building quick...

like, like I used to say, prototype tools. There might be something similar to what you would previously build with like a tool like Webflow or something like that, where it's, it's like a low code type tool or, or actually, you know, iterating on that with AI and potentially building something that you plan to have in production. And yeah,

I think it's worth noting that like we're talking about AI engineering. We're talking about like having the AI write code for you. And I think that works great in a situation where you're creating a petition website to save like a public park and, and fix it. It may work less great when you're trying to build an enterprise level. Absolutely. Yes. And you probably want a lot of that. Uh, so I just, I just want to be clear that like,

in my humble opinion, you are going to eventually want to come back and solidify your, your foundations. Uh, but these tools can undoubtedly help you get running faster. And as you said, get you following the fun. So, um,

Some of the things that I'm interested in, what is a returnship? Like an internship type? Sure. Like returnship. Returnship. So this is something that we have in our state in Utah, and it's probably in other states. But the idea is that there are women that take time off from the workforce, and there are state-sanctioned

internships and they call them returnships to help women reenter the workforce. So something to look into if this is the case for you is potentially a returnship that's sponsored by the legislation in your state.

Awesome. And then you said that your husband is now like there was a period and you have talked about this publicly before. So I just want to be clear. This is not like I'm not trying to ask like a gotcha type question, but there was a period at which point your income eclipsed your husband's income. And at least in the United States, like we're still a very patriarchal society and it is like

awkward with your, uh, with your wife is making more money than you. And that happened to me too. When I left my job as a school director to focus on, you know, learning the program and trying to get a software, like my income essentially went to zero. So there was a period we were dependent on her for benefits and, and like she was bringing in the money and everything like that. So I've experienced that firsthand. So I don't want to be insensitive to that, but there was a period where your income eclipsed your husband's. And what was that like? What were the dynamics of that? It's,

So actually for most of our marriage, I was the breadwinner in our household because when my husband and I first got together, he was working at a nonprofit and in San Francisco making like $30,000 a year. And,

And when I got together with him, I said, you need to make more than $30,000 a year. Like, what are you going to do? And so he decided to go to law school. So I put him through law school. I was working full time. He went to law school, got his JD. He got a master's degree and then he got his first job as an attorney in San Francisco. But at that time, it was not even six figures when he got his first job.

So I was always making more than him and the breadwinner until I left the workforce and then he became the breadwinner. And I don't think it's ever been awkward. I think he would love to actually never work again. He's a musician also, actually. I think a lot of people would love that. Yeah. Yeah. So he's actually working on an album right now because he is taking a sabbatical from work. He's a bass player.

And so, yeah. So I told him when I returned to work, like, hey, can you... Because he was working as an attorney, working like crazy, like 70, 80 hours. He was taking calls at 3 a.m. with his colleagues during his busy time. That's crazy. I was like, this is not going to work for our family. So we kind of made the agreement that he would stop working. He would kind of focus on the family. Both my kids are in school full time. So it's not like he's like...

at home with toddlers, but he is taking a year off of work and able to kind of do the majority of the drop-off pickups and manage soccer practice while I can ramp up my career. And he is completely comfortable with the idea of me being the breadwinner.

Very cool. Yeah. It sounds like a chill dude, like fellow bass player. I'm here for that. My, you know, the plight of the recent law school grad trying to like make their way up through the hierarchy in law school, that does not sound like an existence I'd wish on anyone. No, no. He's just a musician at heart that kind of had to get a job to support the family. And now that we're in a position where,

where that's not necessary. Like he's definitely happy to like leave the workforce. And when he does go back, he wants to work in a nonprofit. So it's kind of having that financial flexibility that we have now, thanks to working in tech, where I can pursue something that's kind of on the entrepreneurship route and he can pursue something that's fulfilling to him, which is on the nonprofit side.

Yeah. I want to talk about childcare a little bit. One of the things you mentioned to me that I was not really familiar with was the notion of like an au pair, like kind of,

So for the moms out there that are trying to reenter the workforce, like you hear this fancy French term and you think, oh, that's for like super duper rich people. But it sounds like you actually were able to find an agency and get somebody like relatively inexpensively, not necessarily as much as just sending two kids to daycare would cost. To daycare. Yeah. So when I started to look into it, the place that we lived in San Francisco had a

like one bedroom. We had an extra bedroom in our house, which we were very lucky to have at that time. And so we realized if we looked into the au pair situation, we would provide them living in our home and we would pay for their food. And we found an agency to go through. I could Google it. I don't remember what the name of the agency is, but Google au pair agency. And

And we were able to remotely interview this woman, Nana, and she lived in Thailand and we hit it off. She was great. So we hired her as our au pair. She came over from Thailand, lived with us for two years in our kind of basement apartment room.

And we paid her $200 a week. And it seems like so low, but that's the kind of rate, the going rate for au pairs is $200 a week. And then you also pay an agency fee. So in total, it came about out to about $1,500 a month for full-time childcare in our home where both my kids could have like a woman that,

We actually still to this day talk to her. We went to her wedding. We're good friends with her. And so it was just an all-in-all really great situation. That's awesome. Yeah. So that's an option for people that are lamenting the high cost of childcare, which hopefully will eventually become heavily subsidized. And hopefully... Hopefully. Because that would be a huge windfall to parents everywhere if childcare weren't so absurdly expensive. Yeah. I mean, like...

It could make sense to just have one of the parents stay home just because the amount of income they have to earn has to be more than the cost of childcare to warrant the effort. Because I mean like I'm sure childcare places are great and all, but like...

I think it'd be a pale substitute for actually hanging out with your mom or your dad all day. Um, yeah. So, yeah. And that's where the, the, when you work a remote job. So I was like, um, able to work from home as much as I wanted to. And our au pair was, uh, taking care of our daughter and our son in our home. So I could just pop out and see them as I like took breaks from work. And so that made it really nice too. So you were the first person,

kid to graduate from college in like your family line uh your dad was working as a truck driver which is an arduous job i don't know if he was actually driving like very far away and then being gone for multiple days yeah it's like that's like it's a lifestyle like yeah there's the the meme that like yeah my dad was a trucker and like i i saw him like a few times like the combined total amount of time i spent with him every year was like maybe a month or something like that like like

I just want to talk about that kind of generational, I guess, progress in terms of flexibility, quality of life, the opportunity that you're able to afford your kids. A lot of the previous generation, I like to say that every generation wants the subsequent generation to be better off. I want my kids to be more prosperous, smarter than me. Yeah, yeah. And like...

Maybe you can talk about that transition a little bit in your relationship with your dad and like what you, what advice you would give to people who have kids and like who might have gone to study liberal arts or something like you and I did and, and who want to have that kind of like flexibility or upward mobility or whatever the term is. Can you, can you go a little more into detail on that?

Sure. So I will say two things about growing up with my dad. He's quite the character, I will say that. But he would always quiz me in math growing up. So because he was a truck driver, whenever we were on road trips, he would always ask, you know, if we're going 60 miles an hour and, you know, the next rest stop is 30 miles away, you know, how long is it going to take us to get there? And so he would always have these like math questions for us. And I always like enjoyed that growing up. And then he was also a book collector. So he was always like,

So he had a library of 10,000 books. And so that made me be a book collector and a big time reader. So now I have a library in my home. I haven't counted how many books, not 10,000. But I think as a parent, the modeling that you do has an effect on your kids. So-

My dad being really into books made me really into books. And my dad, like, quizzing me on math made me just, like, have a high level of math confidence. And then, yeah, going forward, it's I'm doing the same things for my kids. I try not to be on my phone in front of my kids. I try to be, like, reading a book. And because there's a study that shows that if a kid perceives their parents as readers, they will become better readers, right?

And so that's, that's my idea. Sometimes I don't want to be reading a book and I would rather be on my phone, but just being able to model that for my kids. Um, so yeah, I think I had some really good qualities from my dad, uh, that led me into like, um,

having a high level of math confidence being, um, you know, being like an insatiable learner really is like always reading and always wanting to learn. And yeah, I hope that carries on to my kids. And like you said, the real goal is for my kids to surpass whatever I do. And I really do want to focus on them, you know, encouraging them to be the best that they can be, like just really seeing their potential. Yeah. I have a last question for you. Um, and I,

I'm really excited to hear your answer to this. Let's say hypothetically you could send a message back to yourself when you were – maybe you were like 17, 18. I'm not sure if you were an early achiever and had everything mapped out exactly what you wanted to do in life or if you were still like, oh, I guess college. But if you could send something back to yourself to prepare yourself to maybe –

Keep you from going down like some blind alleys. And of course, if things were different, they wouldn't be the same. You know, you wouldn't be exactly who you are if you didn't necessarily... You know, Star Trek, Next Generation Tapestry, one of the greatest Star Trek episodes where... I don't know if you watch Star Trek, but like Captain Picard gets a chance to like...

undo some of the mistakes he made as a brash, young, overconfident, uh, Starfleet officer. Right. Um, so, and, and everything. And then you see that like those, those were the mistakes that made him who he was today, you know, but let's say hypothetically, um, you could send something back that would just save you a whole bunch of heartache or a whole bunch of stress or something like that. Like what, what,

what would you send back to yourself? Oh my goodness. Okay. So if I could kind of tell myself something when I was younger in relation to my career, I would say not everyone is going to be nice. There's going to be mean people in the world because when I entered my career, I was so naive and I was this girl from Utah and I just thought everyone was just like nice and dah, dah, dah. But in the corporate world,

People are mean and they have like agendas and they have like political maneuvers that they're trying to do to get to where they want to be in the corporate world. And I just was so naive to that. So I would tell my younger self, just know that not everyone is nice and you're going to encounter some mean people and just kind of like mentally prepare for that.

Perfect. Well, I'm so glad that you were able to persist in the face of those mean people. And you didn't let any of them discourage you from ultimately becoming who you've become today. You know, a developer, a data engineer, an educator, helping people improve their lives.

life, helping moms just be able to have the confidence to get back in on the saddle, so to speak, and reenter the workforce. And I just want to thank you again for all that you're doing for the developer community. Thank you very much, Allison. Yeah. Likewise. Thank you, Quincy. And thank you, FreeCodeCamp. A lot of the moms at Tech Moms get their start using FreeCodeCamp material. So it really feels kind of just like full circle to be here with you.

We met in San Francisco like 10 plus years ago. So thanks for having me. Yeah. Well, uh, I'm so proud that, uh, we're, we're having that impact that the free code camp community, uh, is having that is touching the lives of women as they, uh, get back, like,

plan to get more technical and ultimately pursue, uh, developer careers and technical careers. So thank you so much. And, uh, yeah, uh, I'll be excited to see where you go and what moves you make and how you leverage AI and other tools to continue to, uh, just expand your sphere of influence. And, and, uh, I'm, I'm very excited to of course, watch some of your upcoming videos and read some of your upcoming articles as well. Cool. Sounds good. Yeah. I can't wait.

Awesome. Well, everybody, until next week, happy coding. Happy coding. Bye.