It’s time to celebrate our Girl Coders again with putting our 900th(!) member in the spotlights! And we are very honoured it was Julia who pushed the ‘join’-button late May, ’cause she’s got a pretty awesome story:

What was your path in becoming a programmer?
I always had some kind of interest in technology but I used to follow my strong passion for music for most of my life and therefore studied musicology (along with media studies and art history) and worked for MTV for a while. I noticed though that I got mostly interested in the technical aspects of my work and how the program we used worked and could be improved. After finishing my bachelor thesis on music videos I was sure I wanted to go in a different direction and started to teach myself some HTML and CSS to build very basic websites. I then went on to also learn some Ruby but quickly realised that in this way I wouldn’t be able to learn as fast as I wanted to. Also, I was very quickly convinced that I wanted to find a job as a developer since I got so passionate about coding that I forgot to eat when I was busy with it. That’s why I decided to do the 10 week Codaisseur full stack web development academy where I learned everything I needed to know to be a junior web developer.

Why did you join Girl Code?
I want to meet more people that love coding as much as I do and I am very interested in how other women feel about entering this amazing world. Also, I would love to have some chats about frameworks and languages other developers use to find more inspiration about what I want to learn next. So all in all I just would love to be part of a community of likeminded people.

What are you most proud of?
I remember that last year July I went to a BBQ of an IT student association. I tried to have some talks about coding but noticed quickly that I didn’t understand so much. Now less than a year later I am able to build my own full stack web applications and feel confident to master nerdy talks. Besides that I also managed to be able to talk pretty good Dutch within less than a year. So I guess what I am proud of is how fast I was able to learn new things and also how much of it was just learning by doing and not being afraid of it, just going for it.

What kind of job are you looking for?
For me the most amazing thing would be finding a possibility to combine my passion for music and for coding. I would love to work for a company like Spotify or last.fm for example. So that’s kind of a dream of mine but for now I want to mainly find a company where I can keep developing my skills and build something that is a positive change in the world.

Do you have advice for aspiring Girl Coders?
Just go for anything that you feel some kind of passion for. And never compare yourself to others but only to yourself a couple of months ago, then you will always be really proud of all the things you have already learned and achieved.

So, what are you waiting for?! Hire this builds-Hangman-games-for-fun awesome developer before someone else snatches her before you!

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