Nevertheless, Estee Coded
Tags: wecoded, career, codenewbie
Published: 2022-03-07 19:07:20

Hi, I'm Estee and you can call me ST. My pronouns are She/He, because I don't really feel strongly about my gender in either ways. If I'm playing games, my friends know that I could be very manly in my playing style and if I see cockroaches, you will see me shrieking like a girl. Yes, you can dispute that either gender can be reacting in the same way, and that's a point that I hope more people are aware about when they meet people. It was only by chance, I was born as a girl.

I gave a brief glimpse of my coding background in [an interview with the CodeNewbie Community](https://community.codenewbie.org/codenewbie/estee-tey-an-adaptable-bold-and-open-minded-coder-i40) previously, but here's a more complete digest of my background in tech & tech career.
 
## Background in Tech

1. First experience with coding at age 21, nearing the end of 1st year of university due to freshmore curriculum.
2. In university, I tried to cover ground in various parts of the tech industry because I didn't know what I really wanted to do in tech, even though I didn't mind the idea of coding for a living.
  - In the 2.5 years of school curriculum under the Infosystems major, I learnt introductory concepts on android app development in Java, algorithms, machine learning, data science, game development with Unity. 
  - Outside of school, I signed up for courses by myself to learn about Internet of Things (IOT), mixed reality app development for HoloLens 2, Blockchain Development.
  - Out of all of these, I only enjoyed the app & game development courses 😆
  - I also had 1 internship in IT project management, and 1 internship as a Software Engineer.
3. Eventually, I graduated in a bad time when COVID hit pretty hard, September 2020. 
  - Because of that, a full-time job offer I attained in March 2020 got pushed back to an indefinite date. 
  - **Nevertheless**, life goes on, and bills had to be paid. So I just applied for another job during my finals and I became a Software Engineer trainee for another company in the mean time. 
  - The former offer did eventually got back for me to start working in Jan 2021.
4. I've worked in a global tech consultancy company as a Software Developer since then, and I've gotten to work on 5 different projects since my time there.

## Working in tech

I've made a twitter thread previously on my WFH experience based on the 1st 4 projects that I worked on in my current job.

{% embed https://twitter.com/estee_tey/status/1476213935908868097 %}

For my current project (5th project) that I'm in now, it is very technically challenging compared to all the previous projects for me. The tough part is not the tech stack, but rather understanding the complexity of the system design of microservices, and also to perform technical solutioning with a lot of ambiguity under high pressure from the client. 

**Nevertheless**, I'm excited to learn more in-depth about all of these including the tech stack which comprises of React, React Native, Typescript, Express, Kubernetes, Azure Platform. 

I would also be looking forward to building more side projects to learn stuff that I don't get to do at work, and teaching developers like you on various concepts through [the technical articles that I write](https://blog.esteetey.dev/).

## Some concluding thoughts

I'm lucky enough to be born in Singapore, a place where women are less discriminated albeit the fact that there is still a very low gender ratio for the tech industry. Honestly, if it is a fact that girls are just not as interested in tech, then so be it. But if they are interested and they are denied opportunities just because of being a "She", then that's another story. 

I hope that people will look at individuals via traits more rather than just using the gender label as a convenient way to group people into boxes to be shoved into areas outside their comfort zone. 

People are like onions, with many layers deep. Some when you cut it, it will make you cry. But some when you fry it, it's pretty tasty.