Kamryn Ohly

Growing up, Kamryn believed her only path to success would be behind the footsteps of others, taking a road already paved for her—why risk failure and embarrassment by going in your own direction? She was taught engineering was for the boys, and that a girl should stick to being kind, courteous, and helpful. While Kamryn had a phenomenal support system and academic record, she felt utterly lost in regards to her own personality, and found that she was who others expected or wanted her to be. Technology changed this, giving Kamryn a platform and voice to express herself, and the hacker community acted as a cheering squad for all her endeavors. Hackathons provided opportunities to push her comfort zone by exploring new facets of her passions and self, letting her shatter the stereotypes that once ruled her life. Because of fellow hackers and her experiences, she is no longer afraid to fall as she has a community that would raise her back up. Coding completely changed her ideology, and through a maze of code files she was able to find herself.

Kamryn joined the hacker community in summer 2016 through the NYC branch of Kode with Klossy, a nonprofit organization dedicated to closing the gender gap in technology. The empowering community and environment at the camp inspired her to continue studying code on her own and return the following summer for camp at their Chicago branch. As a curious thirteen-year-old, Kamryn began coding in HTML/CSS, Javascript, and Ruby before transitioning to Java, Python, and iOS development with Swift. She fell in love with computer science at the camp and decided to dive deeper into STEM’s ocean of opportunity by attending her first hackathon, Technica 2018. Living in a small town on the coast of Ohio, she pushed herself out of her comfort zone by traveling to College Park, Maryland for the event, and was beyond excited to find such a supportive and motivating community. While she was intimidated at first being so far from home, the positive all-female environment cultivated by hackathon leaders, teammates, and mentors was empowering, keeping her laughing and humming to pop playlists even as she made fatal errors in her project. Technica 2018 pushed her to learn new languages, explore new coding avenues, connect with hundreds of friends, and seek new opportunities. On top of the event’s incredible brain breaks, conversations, and leaders, it allowed her a comfortable and motivational avenue to join the hacker community and guided her professional aspirations towards technology. After Technica 2018, Kamryn went on to intern at NASA Plum Brook, win two awards from TechTogether Boston, attend many more hackathons, and serve as an instructor assistant for Kode With Klossy to teach more young women about the superpower of coding.

Kamryn is driven by her dedication to support fellow women in technology and give back to those feeling as lost as she used to. Kamryn was captivated by technology since she became best friends with Google in elementary school, yet she did not have an environment to foster such interest until she branched out from her small hometown and traveled for Kode With Klossy. The experience turned her into a “professional nerd” with aspirations of becoming a tech leader, and provided the motivation to push past her fears of failure and complacency to organize a coding club, intern at NASA, and convince her family to let her travel alone to distant hackathons. Life is a revolving door of change, and simply walking through the entrance of a hackathon opens dozens of additional doors to explore new experiences and opportunities.

Despite her positive experiences, Kamryn often wonders about where she would be without finding her catalyst in technology, and worries about other women who may have slipped through the cracks without finding a community to empower them by exploring their interests and selves. Kamryn wonders if she would be happier taking a break, being selfish, or spending more time with her cats and Netflix, but she refuses to let her comfort zone blind her from chances to empower other young women, dedicating herself to empowering others who were also once obsessed with sudoku and had conversations with Google. As an instructor at two remote Kode With Klossy camps in 2020, Kamryn witnessed and was moved by young girls’ moments of realization that they have a passion for programming. Their confidence and dedication to changing the world cleared any doubts Kamryn had blocking her future aspirations, pushing her to do more and be more for her community. While Kamryn is still learning about new facets of herself and her future, the hacker community kickstarted her growth and helped her write her own story. Kamryn aims to study computer science in university and create new ways to provide quality STEM education to all, and she will not stop until the glass ceiling in computer science is shattered.

At TechTogether Boston 2020, Kamryn reunited with Kode With Klossy alumni (Hana Memon and Sofia Ongele) to create her favorite project, Aurora. They were inspired by the movie Just Mercy to use technology for spreading awareness, providing resources, and connecting different groups to promote social change and spark important conversations. Aurora connects those who were disenfranchised by the criminal justice system with pro-bono legal aid and with legislators. Connecting people in need with those who can provide short-term help and those who can make larger-scale changes allows technology to be a catalyst for creating dialogue so that all voices can be heard. Despite being excited by their plan, such development felt ambitious and even unreasonable to complete in 36 hours; however, they were determined to code and learn as much as possible while they had the opportunity, confidence, and support of those around them. They finished an MVP with hours to spare and implemented additional features and complex APIs to the project. They used Firebase, Google Civic Information API, Apple’s Mapkit, and various Cocoapods to bring Aurora to life, and the assistance of MLH mentors was critical in creating the most technical iOS project Kamryn had ever worked on. Kamryn was extremely grateful when a fellow hacker paused work on their own project to help her debug at 4 am after she encountered devastating errors just hours before the submission deadline. Building Aurora beyond the scope they had originally planned was unbelievably fulfilling, and the project won both Best Political Polarization Hack and Best Philanthropic Hack. The building experience further motivated her to pursue a future in technology, yet the social experience of working with teammates passionate about using tech for social justice, as well as willing to explore new ideas, go for late-night boba tea runs, and find humor in failure, made the event her favorite hackathon ever and showed her the importance of empowerment and positivity in teamwork.

Her NASA mentor once said, “It’s a disease of the mind to love staring at a screen for hours and still be excited to see a new error code,” and he was totally right that her passion for coding is a bit extreme. Despite being a perfectionist, coding is the place where Kamryn feels free to make mistakes and pursue a wide range of interests, as she sees coding not as a constricting framework of ones and zeros, but as an amazing catalyst of creativity, storytelling, and solutions for global crises with almost infinite potentialities. She wants to harness this superpower to continue giving back to the community that supported and raised her to be who she is today. Hackathons have given Kamryn a place to find like-minded people that share the same passions as her, which was incredibly hard to come by as a “small-town girl living in a lonely world.” Before learning to code and joining the hacker community, she believed cities could not get any larger than Cleveland, Ohio for her, but now through tech, she has the world at her fingertips.