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Inspiring interviews, simple-to-understand training and tech coaching so you can GET TECHY!

Episode #36 - Tania Rascia, Web Developer

About This Podcast

20% of tech jobs are held by women. 20%!!!! That is ridiculous! What is going on here? Why does tech repel women? We will explore that and many other topics that will empower you, support you and educate you to get TECHY! YOU ARE TECHY! Whether you know it or not, you are techy. I can’t wait to show you how. As a returnship mother of four, I have felt techy, felt not techy and everything in between. I’ll show you how to grow your skills and share with you some of my favorite friends who are women just like you crushing it in the tech world. Join me! We having a fantastic ride ahead of us!

In This Episode...
  • >> Working as a developer.
  • >> Writing clean code.
  • >> Instructional training manuals on full stack development written with clarity!
Transcript

Ellen Twomey: You are listening to the You are Techy Podcast, episode number 36.

Voiceover: Welcome to the You are Techy Podcast where it’s all about growing in your techiness. So you can find it the tech job of your dreams. And now your host, technology learning coach Ellen Twomey.

Ellen Twomey: Are you a mom ready to break into the field of technology as a UX designer? Wondering how you can go from no tech experience to getting hired? The answer: Demonstrate your work.

That’s how tech works. You don’t need a degree or fancy certificate. You just need a portfolio that shows your work. The You Are Techy UX Portfolio course specializes in getting moms into tech by not only teaching you the core portfolio-ready UX skills to get hired, but also by giving you the confidence to stay focused on your goal.

Join our course today at  YouAreTechy.com/UX. The UX Portfolio course offers portfolio-ready assets, step-by-step UX learning and insight tips on how UX design looks in the real world. Plus a community of women to go through the program with. You’ll have access to mentors. And if you sign up before July 31st, you’ll receive one free month of weekly group hot seat coaching. Just go to YouAreTechy.com/UX.

If software engineering is your goal, you’ll eat up all the great info our guest has today. Tania Rascia has worked on the technical side of things since 2014. She came to the tech side from the food industry, which rounds out about every industry entry point of our guests. So I’m excited to have her on. Is food service the most direct route to tech, highly unlikely, but Tania’s story shows us that all previous experience contributes to your unique story.

Tania’s fans and supporters say some pretty cool things about her. “Tania’s a voracious learner and a prolific educator. In the time I’ve known her, she’s been able to achieve competency in anything she puts her mind to.”

 Next one, this is just from a Twitter follower. “When do you have time for all this?  I mean, you are like a tutorial factory. Great job. If only I could find a mentor like you.”

 Another one, “Tania writes some of the best written and efficient code I’ve seen.” 

One more. “Her technical skills are superb. She picks up new concepts quickly and enthusiastically with a particular talent for design and clean code.” Ooh, I like that one. 

What I find most impressive, however, is the way she contributes to our chaotic and blossoming field. Her personal website contains an overwhelming amount of in-depth articles with a focus on empathy and beginner friendliness that webdev is sorely lacking.

Woo. What a compliment. Tania is an avid contributor to the education of future technologists through her personal website, TaniaRascia.com. Her clear non-clutter approach to explaining and teaching technology while being an industry-leading software developer has led to her over 13,000 Twitter followers.

Tania resides in Chicago, Illinois, and we are so happy to have her on the show today. Tania welcome. 

Tania Rascia: Thanks. Thanks for having me. 

Ellen Twomey: I’m excited to talk to you. I’ve had you on my radar for a while. I love seeing women in web development teaching and learning others and contributing in a way that’s significant and impressive for all.

I’d love for you to just tell us about your career journey and what led you to software development. 

Tania Rascia: Yeah. I mean, I would definitely say my career journey, isn’t the most, you know, orthodox and straightforward path that most people take. But I mean, it got me here. I was kind of a nerd growing up and got my first computer in 1994 for the whole family. And you know, I was kind of addicted to computers ever since. So, I started off early on the web and I would just make little websites for myself, geocities and all that kind of stuff when I was a kid. You know, as time went on and you know, I went to college and started a career, all that stuff kind of fell to the wayside.

So, definitely when I started my career transition, I wasn’t at all up to speed with anything that modern tech is doing. But I went to culinary school. I worked in restaurants for about eight years and I just kind of realized it wasn’t my passion or just a really great career for me.

I wanted to find something that I really loved doing. And the restaurant industry is really hard. If it’s not your passion, those hours and those late nights, they’re just not sustainable. And I wanted to find something else. So that’s when I kind of just, I actually, like, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of, “What color is your parachute?” which is a book to kind of help you figure out what career you should have. Well, I just kinda went through it. It’s got like exercises kind of figure stuff out because I just didn’t know. It’s not like I was like, you know, It’s obvious. I mean, now it seems to obvious, but, yeah, I just went through so all that and it just kind of kept coming back to web development and finally, I decided this really is kind of what makes sense to me. So I would say my decision wasn’t inspired by, Oh, it’s a good career. It has good hours. It has good pay. I wasn’t even entirely aware of all that. I just knew this is something I know that I would really enjoy doing for long periods of time.

And then from there, once I figured it out, it was a little bit tough to get started without any prior experience or education associated with it. But I mean, I think the great thing about tax is just that if you – if you have a passion for it, if you enjoy it, if you can, if you could just sit down and learn, I mean, everything’s out there on the internet for you to find, so you can get there.

Ellen Twomey: I love it. Great story. And I’ve done some food service and I totally agree with you. It’s definitely a challenging, path, but I learned a lot waiting tables about empathy of users. I find that to be a striking – that really helps me a lot of times I’ll go back to my table-waiting days  and think about users that way.

So here’s the thing that everybody wants to know because everyone answers this question a little differently, but like what does your day to day look like? Are you on an Agile team? Do you do stand ups? 

Tania Rascia: Yeah, well obviously the one big change that’s different than usual is just working from home every day, which wasn’t necessarily, what I was doing before, but you know, basically everything else is the same and the current place I’m working, yeah it’s an Agile, kind of shop set up. So every day at 10:00 AM, we have a standup and it’s like 15 minutes. I would say my team is around 10 people between back end developers, front end developers, manager, and, just a couple UX people in there. So, everybody just kind of, it gives that one minute summary of what they did yesterday, what they’re working on today.

One thing is like, if you’re going to have a conversation that is going to involve a lot of people, wait until the end and let everyone else get off and get to what they need to do and just only keep the relevant people which they call a parking lot. So I think that’s a very important aspect of the whole standup.

Beyond that, I mean, there’s meetings that come up throughout the week in case we need to discuss something. And then since it’s sprint there’s sprint planning, sprint retro and sprint grooming. So every two weeks on a Tuesday, we’ll just decide what all the tickets that we need to work on for the next two weeks are.

And then all that is kind of handled through JIRA software, which I think is pretty much the standard for most people who use the Agile system. I mean, that’s it, as far as, the technical, these are the things we need to do every week. Most of the rest of my time is just honestly spent coding.

Ellen Twomey: And what stack do you work in? 

Tania Rascia: So everything that we do is in JavaScript both front end and back end, and I’m working as a full stack developer. So that means I’ll be making changes to the front end repositories and the back end repositories. But considering that they’re all in the same language, there are, you know, some differences here and there between browser and server JavaScript. But I mean, it’s the same language. So it’s easy to find people who can do both in that environment, I would say versus two completely different languages. 

Ellen Twomey: And your framework. So what framework are you working in? 

Tania Rascia: We’re using React on the front end. React with Redux for state management. And then for Node, it uses Express as the server. So I have also in my previous job used View, which they built their enterprise app on View. So I’m familiar with that, but just not doing it at my current position. 

Ellen Twomey: Cool. Thank you. Alright, so I’m curious to hear – it sounds like you spend a lot of time coding. but I’m curious, like, what’s your favorite part of your job? What do you like best about what you do? 

Tania Rascia: I mean, I would have to say coding is, is the essential part. It’s, you know, when you have a a problem, or just like a goal and you don’t a hundred percent know how to do it, but you know, you’ll get there, there’s just something really satisfying about arriving at that. Even if it’s just bug fixing, it’s like you found this bug and it’s, where’s it coming from? There’s like a sense of satisfaction that comes from, I figured it out. I solved it. It’s done like that part, but even like, at this point in my career, I’m doing a lot more or the architecture level stuff, or I’m actually designing how the whole system works, so that’s also very challenging and rewarding. 

Ellen Twomey: And you liked doing the architecture stuff as well? 

Tania Rascia: Yeah, it was definitely something that early on in my career, I didn’t want to do, I wanted someone more experienced to be handling that and just handing the decisions down. But what I found over my career is that that person doesn’t always exist.

So a lot of times, even though I wasn’t the most experienced, I just kind of had to jump in and learn what needed to be done. And that’s probably helped contribute to my knowledge base over the years. 

Ellen Twomey: Yeah, for sure. I love what you said about diving into a problem that you don’t know the solution to.

As I work with newbies in the tech space, that’s often the biggest hurdle that I have to coach them through, is that actually that is a normal state that you don’t know. You’re not going to know the whole answer. So they’re looking for like, what’s that one line of code answer or in my UX program, what’s that one way that we build a wireframe and kind of that ambiguity explaining how – no, that is the process that it’s okay that you don’t know in the beginning. And I think that’s like a big hurdle they have to overcome. Was there anything you did to really overcome any fears?

Did you ever have any fears around that? Or was that ever a struggle for you? If you’ve got to go back in your brain to 2014, when you were first starting out? 

Tania Rascia: Yeah, that was definitely a struggle, especially with JavaScript because it’s so ambiguous. There’s so many different ways to do things. I mean, having frameworks helps, but even still it’s like, do you choose React? Do you choose View? Do you choose Angular? Now there’s Svelte. There’s so many different options that even just knowing which one of those to choose is hard. And before I wanted to use a framework, I wanted to kind of figure out how to do things just from scratch without any framework and that’s even harder cause there’s not a lot of resources on that. So you have to kind of accept that there is no one right way to do pretty much anything in JavaScript. There might be some wrong ways to do things, but there’s not necessarily a right way. 

Ellen Twomey: Right. All right well, it sounds like you’re living a utopian dream, but let’s just imagine that there’s one thing about your job that you don’t love or that you find challenging.  What would you say that is? 

Tania Rascia: I mean that one’s kind of hard cause like, I don’t necessarily feel extremely stressed out or anything by something at work that’s not going great in my current position. Definitely in previous jobs, I have worked in places where like the code base was a huge mess and that was extremely frustrating.

Like literally I would open up a file and just, you know, it’s 9:01 am and I’m like, Oh God, you know, another eight hours of this. I don’t know if I can deal with it. So, I mean, on a code level that has happened previously. Right now that’s not so much of an issue. I would just say, you know, you’re working as a team, you have to make team decisions.

So you can’t just go off and do whatever you want to do. Sometimes you have to like get people on board with the idea and they might not always be on board. I’d like to think I’m pretty persuasive sometimes, but I mean, I accept that not everything that I want to do is going to go exactly how I want to do it. So that’s just kind of something, the politics of working in a team is, you know, something you also have to be good at aside from just being good at coding. There’s always like, Oh, that person’s a genius and will just do whatever and go off and do their own thing. But it’s much better to work in a team and have a consensus. 

Ellen Twomey: Right and have everybody kind of moving in the same direction. 

So I actually loved the comment –  I feel like this is the one that you should highlight and should be  your new title of like “Writer of Clean Code.” That’s such a high compliment. There’s so few people get that compliment.

Why do you think you’re able to write such clean code that other developers recognize as clean? 

Tania Rascia: I honestly think there’s something about like the visual, even of looking at code that if it, if it looks like a mess, it doesn’t even matter how good it is in the end. Like you have to look at it and kind of like, feel that you like how it looks. And maybe the fact that I did so much design beforehand, where those kinds of aesthetics are important to me, like the fact that the code is consistent. I love consistency. If something’s being done one way, and the same thing is being accomplished a different way elsewhere, I would rather put the work in to refactor that and make it consistent. And that’s even something that has come up with the team on like the front end, at my current job where we’ll open a JIRA ticket, like these are the things that are inconsistent across the app. Let’s all tackle one and agree on what we want to do and tackle one.  And that’s honestly been really great. So I feel like the clean code isn’t just my open source stuff, it’s what I’m working on at work as well. 

Ellen Twomey: Yeah. I love that. That’s probably, as I’m hearing this, what makes you a really clear teacher of beginners is that  you’re consistent in the way you do it.

 Are there any other pieces where you say, I mean, cause you started just teaching, right? Explaining things on your website and on blogs and what kind of prompted you to do that? 

Tania Rascia: I would get so frustrated by finding all these tutorials. And I just want to do something simple. And I have like 27 tabs open and stack overflow and three tutorials and each tutorial has like 37% of what I need to get it done. And I started realizing that was really actually pretty simple, it just seems so difficult because all these people we’re not explaining it very well, or they were only explaining part of it and assuming a lot of prior knowledge.

So as a beginner, I feel like I had that beginner mindset where I could say, you need to have all of these things set up before you can do this. And let’s build the thing from start to finish. This is what you should end up with and you started off with nothing and let’s make sure there’s no fluff in there.

So I started doing that to document for myself, and then I learned that other people benefited from it a lot 

Ellen Twomey: The way you say it sounds so simple. And yet it’s so true. Like there’s so many bad resources and I spend most of my time saying, okay, don’t look at all the resources, focus your attention, and here’s what really is going to kind of get you to the next step, because when women come into our community, they’re looking to get hired, right? And they’re like, how do I learn so I can build a portfolio so I can get hired? And the problem is when you start learning, if one thing confuses you, then you go to the next thing and then you end up in this rabbit hole of like, where do I even end up? Or how do I even get there?

So, we’re gonna, you know, share all your info and stuff, but I definitely recommend your website because of your clarity of thought. There’s no garbage in there. It’s just, here’s the way it works. And I think it’s really awesome even though, if you’re not familiar with – when I first started at your website, I mean, I’m not working in React every day. That’s not what I’m doing, but it’s still that clarity of thought. I was like, yeah, I totally get this. And I think that even someone who doesn’t have a background in programming could really understand it.

So that’s super helpful, but I want to know if you have any advice for someone who wants to start off in software development, but let’s start from a learning perspective. Like a new to tech,  I didn’t play around with computers like you did, and I’m not exactly sure where to even dive in first. Obviously your website is going to be a great place, but do you have any recommendations for someone who’s like, okay, it’s week one and I want to get started and I don’t want to get discouraged. What do you recommend? 

Tania Rascia: Yeah, I mean, the very, very first steps are kind of hard to know exactly where to start. I mean, everybody has a different baseline of what they know. I can’t say exactly what resource and specific you should look at.

I mean, a lot of these beginner things are pretty similar, whether you’re going with like a Udemy course or something else that you found online, if it’s Introduction to JavaScript or Introduction to HTML and CSS, they’re probably going to cover most of the same stuff. So I would say the biggest thing that helped me and that I think is helpful for others is starting a blog of some sort.

and maybe if you don’t even want it to be public, notes, but I do think a blog because putting it out there, it doesn’t only help yourself, it helps others. And when you teach something, it means you know it. So once you figure something out, pretend that you’re explaining it to someone else. And it kind of reiterates it to yourself.  So even the most basic beginner things that you don’t think maybe anyone else will benefit from, somebody probably will. And you definitely will. So that’s kinda my biggest advice. 

Ellen Twomey: That’s brilliant. I love that advice. Okay. So what about someone who is, they’ve done the learning, they built their portfolio, they’re kind of ready to get hired. What’s your advice for them, either to get hired or to find a good fit for them. Do you have any advice on that kind of part of the path? 

Tania Rascia: Well, one thing I find a lot with people is that they either get like imposter syndrome or they’re worried about what they don’t know.

And these job descriptions are being written by people – and then they’ll put like, you need 15 years experience for something that came up five years ago. So like you have to not take the job descriptions too literally, because they’re putting way more on there than they even expect, or sometimes it’s even possible.

So, I mean, if you’re just starting out, obviously you want to look for a junior role, but I wouldn’t worry too much if you don’t have every little thing on the resume. Because like, when I started off, like I knew hardly anything about PHP and that, which was the language I started off in, but I would apply to something that had PHP in it and I’m like, you know, I’ll figure it out as I go.

And try to do something that has a lot of the stuff that you do know. And if it has some things on there that you don’t, just accept that you’re going to learn it as you go. And if they hire you, they think that you can. So just kind of have that confidence that you can’t know it all. 

Ellen Twomey: Yeah, definitely, great advice. So we talk about that all the time. How there are actually a statistics where men are much more likely to apply to a job with only 20% of the skills and women on average have to have more like 80% before they apply. It’s just like, those are the stats. And it’s funny, right? I mean, it’s obviously not true for each and every person, but, I think a lot of the job postings are not totally accurate.

I think your example is hilarious cause in my UX background there’ll be like UX UI designer and I’m like, well, okay, do they want you to spend your time interviewing users and creating wireframes, or they want you to spend your time coding. Cause you know what? That’s a lot of different things. And at a small company that might be what they need. But I think it’s important to explain because people often come they’re like, I want to be a UX designer. So first I’m going to learn JavaScript. I’m like, no, no, no, no, no, that’s not where you start. So that’s really good advice.

Okay. So why don’t we just talk about where people can find you and find your information and how they can, learn from your brilliance. 

Tania Rascia: Yeah, I recognize that m y last name is hard to spell and remember. You can actually technically just go to Tania.dev and that will take you to my website. So I usually just give that out if I just need to speak it out loud, but my website is TaniaRascia.com and I mean, it’s pretty simple and straight forward.

It’s just a list of posts and they’re all tutorials and stuff. And I tried to, you know, organize everything in the categories and sections and highlight some of the main ones to help people. it’s not really like start off at zero and here’s the end and everything’s in order, but you know, you just kind of look for – if you want to learn React, you can learn React. If you want to learn View, Redux, Docker.

And I have also written kind of an introductory course on JavaScript for – not a course, but it’s just like a lot of tutorials for DigitalOcean. So all of those are on there too, which is good for someone trying to start off with JavaScript. So yeah, everything everything’s on the website and my open source stuff is on GitHub and I occasionally tweet on Twitter, but not, not too often, but I do post my articles there if you want to keep up with what I’m writing. 

Ellen Twomey: But still you have 13,000 followers. 

Tania Rascia: Yeah. 

Ellen Twomey: Can you spell your name for everyone?  

Tania Rascia: Sure. It’s TANIA RASCIA. And then that’s the same for everything. So Twitter, GitHub, or just TaniaRascia.com. It’s all consistent. 

Ellen Twomey: Great. Tania, I really enjoyed this conversation. I’m excited to share this, share your knowledge with people. I think that, your advice about starting a blog and just putting stuff out there and explaining it is really amazing. I’m glad that it helped you on your journey and because of that, you’ve been able to help so many people. So you really have used it as an example of how to do it and then became an example. And so thank you so much for spending your time with us and sharing that knowledge.

Tania Rascia: Yeah. Thank you so much for your time as well.

Ellen Twomey: Hey, if you enjoyed listening to this podcast, you have to sign up for the You are Techy email list. Imagine being in the tech job of your dreams. Join me to get the strategies, training, and never ending support to get hired. Sign up at YouAreTechy.com.  I’ll see you next time.

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