hi!

Hi! I'm Ali. I'm a software engineer who likes to code for fun and is a little obsessed with her cat. My story starts in Culiacán, a city in northern Mexico where I grew up playing around with my mom's office computer, trying to figure out how it worked. I would make little games and stories in PowerPoint for my family. I coded tiny Flash games for my friends. I wrote short Java programs just to see what would happen, and nobody told me this was a career. I just thought it was the most fun thing to do. So I went to university for business because, why not? And in one of my classes, I had a professor who was a software engineer, and guess what? She was also a woman. She was the first one I'd ever met. And hearing her talk about her job, I realized the thing I'd been doing for fun my whole life was something people actually got paid to do. So I switched majors to tech immediately. To be honest, working in tech is not as magical as you can imagine it to be for me. Programming has always been a creative craft. It's puzzle-solving, it's making something out of nothing, which is why I still build silly projects on the weekends and why I share them here to remind myself and others that tech can be fun. The other reason I'm here though is her, my professor. She just existed doing her work, and that was enough to change what I thought was possible for myself as a Latina from a small city. One person was enough. Enough to make me pursue this career and end up living my best life in New York City because of that. So if my post can be that for someone else, whether inspiration to have fun with pursuing your dreams or seeing yourself represented in the space, then I'm so happy you're here.