Interview
Adewusi points out. “We have such a
vibrant conference calendar in software
engineering. It’s one of the things that I
love about our industry. I would often just
go up to people at conferences and start
asking about their careers. I received a lot
of useful advice and then connected withpeople afterwards to help build up
my relationships.”
Once Adewusi started coding, she
quickly realised she enjoyed the creativity
and the problem-solving aspect but it
wasn’t always easy and at some point she
burned out. “I had a very public breakdown
during a coding workshop, which really
was aimed at experienced React
developers. Everyone was typing away but
I was just staring at my screen and might
as well have been reading Chinese – I just
didn’t understand anything! I started
crying and couldn’t stop. The instructor
was trying to comfort me but I realised
that I had pushed myself a little bit too
far. It made me realise that I needed to
take my time and prioritise my wellbeing.”“I would often just go up
to people at conferences
and start asking about
their careers. I received
a lot of useful advice”
every single week for three hours from
Lexington in Kentucky!”
Adewusi grew so passionate about open
source, she created a GitHub repo for her
learning plan, which she used to record
her programming journey and get advice
from her mentors. She also attended
meetups, such as Codebar (codebar.io), a
non-profit initiative focused on
underrepresented groups in tech, as well
as ScalaBridge (www.scalabridge.org),
which runs free workshops on
programming in Scala. Conferences
posed another opportunity to meet
developers and learn more about the
industry culture.
“I took full benefit of the diversity
scholarships that a lot of events offer,”
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