Shining a light on other developers

A couple of months ago, Brenna Flood shared her experiences being marginalized and pushed aside as her white, male colleagues saw their careers take off.

During my career, on three separate occasions, I have been in the position of mentoring a male colleague with the hope of being promoted into management, only to find that person being promoted to manage me instead. … Eventually, I would work with salary information. More often than not I would see overwhelmingly that the male folks I was leading were making on average $20,000 more than me per year. … I feel like this is just the way things are, given that I’m a woman and the world frankly is ruled by white dudes who only listen to other white dudes.

It’s a longer thread on Twitter, but worth reading the whole thing.

After reading about Brenna’s experiences, and others like it, I decided that I want to start shining a light on other developers—particularly those whose voices aren’t as readily heard—whenever I can.

With that in mind, I’m starting a new semi-regular series on this site where I highlight a developer that who’s doing awesome things.

Developer Spotlight: Divya Sasidharan

I met Divya Sasidharan (aka ShortDiv) about four years ago the first Artifact Providence Conference.

At the time, she was a Digital Media student volunteering at the event. While there, SparkBox gave a talk about apprenticeships, and mentioned that they had one. Divya applied, and was selected, and since then, her career has taken off!

Today, she’s a web developer at the Knight Lab, where she helps push journalism into the future. Divya is active in the open source community, and last summer, gave her first conference talk at NEJS on Virtual DOM.

I interviewed Divya last year for a career guide I wrote. Here’s what she had to say about keeping up in an ever changing industry:

You can follow Divya on Twitter at @shortdiv.