How I Got Started As a Software Engineer
It was 1985. My dad walked through the garage door with his arms wrapped around a large package. His gym socks were hiked up to his knees, shorts shorter than should be legal, and a massive smile across his mustachioed face. We all knew what it was.
An Apple IIc computer.
My brother, who is two years older than me, had entered a computer programming contest at school. After we got the computer, he was always frantically typing away on it in the back bedroom, where we kept the machine.
At the time, I wanted to do everything that my brother did. He played baseball; I played baseball. He got a skateboard; I asked for one the next Christmas. He was a coder; I wanted to learn to code.
It was too late for me to enter the current contest, but when my teacher announced the next competition t at school, I got an idea. I walked up to my mom and asked: “Can I enter the programming contest at school?” You might think that, because I was a 9-year-old girl growing up in the 80s, that my mom replied with something like, “You don’t even know how to use a computer.” (which I didn’t) or “What does a little girl want to play with computers for?”
But she didn’t say anything like that. She said, “Ok,” wiped her hands on her apron and got back to putting away the dishes.
I was nine years old when I wrote my first line of code.
My parents never really discouraged me from doing the things that I wanted to do when I was growing up. Quite the opposite, they expected me to perform as well as my older brother.
I was not a typical 9-year-old girl. I liked math and science and wanted to ride my “dirt bike” and play in the mud. I was always chasing my brother and his friends. We would often set up a game in our basement that we called “War.” This elaborate system included Lincoln Log army bases, GI Joes riding My Little Ponies, the Barbie Dream House hospital, Weeble Wobbles hiding out in the Fischer Price Farmhouse, and the Star Wars Ice Planet Hoth. To complete the scene, we had a giant catapult to destroy everything, of course.
At the time, I had no clue that there were people who believed there was a difference in intellect between boys and girls.
