S2E10: Librarian to Web Developer with Lisa Smith

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In today’s episode of the Learn to Code With Me podcast, I talk with Lisa Smith. Lisa is a former librarian who taught herself how to code. She currently works as a frontend web developer for New Media Campaigns and also teaches for Girl Develop It.

Lisa’s path from catalog librarian to web developer began in the late nineties. Her interest in emerging technologies prompted her transition to her first tech job. Her willingness to continue learning opened many doors and brought her to where she is today.

In our conversation, Lisa highlights how important new skills are in the world of tech. Beginner and veteran coders alike will be more successful if they never stop learning. She also talks about how to handle being the only girl in the room when working in tech. Lisa’s story of progress shows that anyone can achieve goals by working hard and speaking up.

 

Laurence:
Hey, it's Laurence Bradford. Welcome to Season 2 of the Learn to Code With Me podcast, where I'm chatting with people who taught themselves how to code and are now doing amazing things with their newly found skills.

Fullstack Academy is a coding bootcamp that helps people become software developers at companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook. Fullstack also offers a part-time boot camp prep course that prepares you for admission into selective coding bootcamps. Visit bootcampprep.io to learn more and get a $500 scholarship with the code learnwithme.

Hey listeners, welcome to the Learn to Code With Me podcast. I am your host, Laurence Bradford. In today's episode I talk with Lisa Smith. Lisa is a self taught coder who currently works as a frontend web developer. But that wasn't always the case. Lisa started off her career as a librarian. However, she switched into web development over 15 years ago, and has been here ever since. In our conversation, Lisa emphasizes the importance of continually learning if you want to work in tech. This applies to both beginner and experienced coders alike. Remember, you can get the Show Notes for this episode, plus a full transcript at learntocodewith.me/podcast. Enjoy the episode!

Hey Lisa, thanks so much for talking with me today.

Lisa:
I'm so glad to be here, thanks for having me.

Laurence:
Yes, of course. Could you introduce yourself to the audience real quick?

Lisa:
Sure, my name is Lisa Smith and I'm a frontend web developer at New Media Campaigns.

Laurence:
Awesome. What I love about your story and I want you to dive into it a bit, is how you started off as a librarian, right?

Lisa:
Yes, that's correct.

Laurence:
So could you just a talk a bit about how you made that transition from being a librarian to a web developer?

Lisa:
Sure, absolutely. I had an undergraduate library degree and I went to grad school because there's not really much you can do with an undergraduate library degree. Everyone I met after I became a librarian was like, "Really?" And every librarian I met when I told them I was a catalog librarian was like, "Really?" There was a basic personality type mismatch between me and librarianship. But I did it for a good long while.

All the time while I was doing that I was learning HTML and this was a long time ago, so it was when you could really wrap your arms around the entire internet and know all there was to know. So I thankfully was able to start at a time when it was easily quantifiable and easily consumable so I just never stopped learning, basically. That's my whole philosophy. I'll learn the next thing. There's new technology, awesome, I'll learn that now. That's totally fine.

Laurence:
Yeah, that's so cool. So about what year did you start learning HTML and other web technologies?

Lisa:
It was 1998, so it's been awhile.

Laurence:
Yeah, that's awesome. You mentioned this before, a catalog librarian. I feel terrible. I actually have no idea what that means, could you explain?

Lisa:
Absolutely. A catalog librarian is the person who describes the physical location and subject and accession type information about a piece of material that goes into a library. So we take the material and we put down who the author is, the title, how long it is, all the bibliographic information. In the olden days, it would be on the cards you would pull out of the drawer. We were responsible for that kind of information. So every piece of material that came into the library, we would touch some way and classify and then put it on the shelves so people could find it.

I worked in a science library where I cataloged socks because we had a textiles department and I worked in a special collection where I catalogued the Andy Griffith game because we were a North Carolina specific collection that had lots of, anything that was about North Carolina or by a North Carolinian was in there. We had lots of weird stuff. Like the history of the Orange County Speedway that was called, 'Go Fast, Turn Left.' It was a fun job.

Laurence:
So when you're explaining that, I kind of see similarities between programming and what you were doing. You were organizing information and it sounds like you were sorting through a lot of stuff. You had to be very logical and methodical about it.

Lisa:
Absolutely. What I like to say is that I became a librarian to help bring people and information together, and I still see my role as doing just that. Now I do it by building accessible, vast, clean web pages, whereas before I made fancy little catalog cards that got shoved in a drawer and people would look at later. But it was the same kind of philosophy and I wanted to make sure that people could get to the information as quickly and easily as possible. That's still what I do. It wasn't a radical shift, but the library world is a little less, it has fewer opportunities basically. Unless you are able to work in a big university, which I was fortunate to do, you're not really going to move up and out.

I had gone on this really interesting bus tour of faculty. The chancellor of our university had organized it. On the very first day, as we were leaving town, he sat down next to me. He's sort of an intimidating guy, he's very smart. We were talking about search engine technology, which at the time was Ask Jeeves, so it's a long time ago. I was super excited about it and part of the way through the conversation he stopped me and said, "Lisa can you tell me why it is you are doing something right now that is almost exactly opposite of what you'd like to be doing. You clearly want to work with technology, why aren't you doing that?" And I said, "That's a super interesting question, sir. I really don't have an answer for you right now, probably because I have not pursued that diligently, but I will certainly get right on that." In fact I met the person who would give me my first job in online on that same trip, so all the things sort of came together when I needed them to.

Laurence:
Wow. So you were learning and about 1998 you said you started. How much later was it when you got your first job in tech or as a web developer?

Lisa:
In 1999. I was hired by the alumni association of the university that I worked at. They were just starting their own online department so I was hired as the online coordinator. I was building web pages, static web pages, and using active server pages, the Microsoft technology, to have dynamic forms. It was a lot of hand coding HTML, lots and lots of tables, and ASP, which I haven't used in a really long time. That was my first gig.

Laurence:
Yeah, so that's kind of nice. You sort of transitioned at the same university, you stayed, it was just from the library to the web department, which was just getting started.

Lisa:
Yeah, well it was the, the alumni association was a separate entity that's not a campus department. It was kind of nice. We're in the middle of campus but we're not part of campus so we were independent and we were able to do some things, we had more agility than a campus department would. We were still a 200 year old organization so we weren't super agile, but it was a little more flexible and we were able to innovate and we had our own server and we were able to keep our stuff separate from the university stuff so we had a lot of flexibility there. It was a great opportunity to learn stuff and they sent me to a webmaster certification program run by another university in town. I don't know that I have all of those skills but I appreciate you thinking I have more than the person who's teaching the class. That was a great, it had an HTML class, and it had a JavaScript class, and it had active server pages and then you did a capstone project at the end. I was one of the first graduates of that program. It was a new program at the university.

Laurence:
Okay, so you worked at a university and then you worked at the alumni association which was separate and it was a little more agile, a little more flexible. How long did you end up staying there for?

Lisa:
I stayed there for three years. We moved to, we still were doing mostly static pages but we were using more active server pages to pull in information. Not quite full content management system, but we were doing more database driven stuff. We had a portal for alumni to come in and check their address and that kind of stuff, which was super cutting edge technology for the time.

Laurence:
Nice. So you were there for three years, you got to learn a lot, build up your skills, and then you left in the early 2000s?

Lisa:
Yeah, so 2001 I had my first daughter and we moved across the state. I worked remotely for a little while but they were not super down with remote technology. So I went back to being a librarian for awhile. I worked at a local university where we had moved to. I wasn't super thrilled doing that but we only lived there for about a year and a half and then we moved to South Carolina and I was doing freelance computer consulting.

There's a lot of retired folks where we moved to that had a lot of money and fancy computers that they didn't know how to use. So I would come over and clean the malware that they had downloaded by clicking on stupid ads and the weather bug and whatever. I would show them how to use their computers. Then I got a job at the local newspaper. Overnight I would take the PDF files of the newspaper that was going to be published for the next morning and chop it up into tiny little JPGs of each article and put it online from about midnight to 2am. That was my next online job.

Laurence:
Geez, wow, that's so crazy. You're actually one of, I don't want to say the few, I think I had some people last season, or some women last season that had kids and they were working in tech. Can you just kind of speak about that? I know we're totally transitioning, but I know a lot of people in the audience are mothers, maybe single mothers learning to code, doing it at night, doing it on the side. I would just love to hear a bit about that.

Lisa:
Absolutely. In the intervening time before I got the job at the newspaper, I had my second child. I had two kids, 3 1/2 and a newborn, so this night job was kind of perfect in terms of, I could be home with them all day and then my husband would get home and he could handle stuff at night. I really wasn't gone that long, it was sort of a part time job. In between there, I was doing all this freelance stuff. I would do webpages for people that asked, but it was sort of one off things. I did the overnight thing for about 6-8 months and then someone left the online department and they asked me if I wanted a full-time job during the day. And I did.
What happened at the same time, it sort of dovetailed with my husband lost his job. So we completely flipped. He would stay home during the day and I would go out to work and we managed doing that for a couple of years. It was interesting being the primary breadwinner and doing that with technology because the paper I was working at was experimental. We were always kind of, 'Today could be our last day so let's do it again.'

It was very tenuous.

I did that job for three years and that was pretty rewarding. Like I said, it was an experimental publication so we could pretty much do anything we wanted. The online part of it was, it had a vibrant online community that I managed. We did all sorts of interactive stuff with the community. We'd have a poll with five classic movies, people would pick the movie they wanted and then we would have the local cinema show it on a weeknight. It was a fun way to get people to both use the website and get out and participate in the community. So we tried to do stuff like that, which was fun.

Laurence:
Yeah, that's really awesome. I love, kind of circling back a little, how you mentioned how your husband lost his job and then you started to work full time. I feel like, I can't remember the article, I think there's actually a book out that a woman wrote about women who are breadwinners, and it's becoming more and more of a norm. I think every year that goes by where, in a relationship where the woman is the breadwinner. I still feel like it is something that is, I don't want to say not socially acceptable, but it's not as common, or social stigma, with the female breadwinner. Then also working in tech where of course, women are also underrepresented.

Lisa:
Correct. It was a really interesting set of circumstances because my husband was very depressed that he had lost his job. He had been the primary breadwinner and was working, he was a (13:48 golf course superintendent?) so he was making a lot of money, so it was a huge role reversal. In fact, things coming out of his mouth were things I had said the year before, like, "You're never home for dinner, why don't we see you, you're working too hard, you're never home," and those sorts of things. And I was like, "Can we acknowledge that we were both maybe a little wrong here because this is untenable."

The paper I was working for was a family owned publication. They owned a large publishing corporation. It was very patriarchal in nature. Whenever we would have these big meetings, I was the only girl in the tech department. So it was very like, "Oh sweetie." I had to really fight against that. I found myself becoming more and more, the more they wanted to control me and put me in a little box, the more I refused to conform to that. It ended up working out for me, but it easily could not have. They were very traditional.

I think the only thing that saved me is that the parent company was pretty far away and because we were an experiment they were like, "Oh let her do whatever she wants." I think that's the only reason I got away with most of it because I was pretty vocal about, "No, this is unacceptable, this idea is how we should go, I've done the research." We had to pick a vendor to do the online paper once we figured out that the stupid little JPGs weren't an acceptable reading circumstance. I did all this research and I found somebody who was willing to partner with us in an experimental way. In fact, they ended up becoming the vendor for all of the papers, and the east coast part of the family. I was like, "I've done enough research to know that of all of the people who can do this for us, these are the ones that are going to match our philosophy and are going to provide the best experience for our readers." I finally got them to see the light. It helped that I got a massive discount because that company was just starting up too. So we partnered and we both helped each other out a bunch.

Laurence:
Sit tight podcast listeners, we're taking a quick break to hear a word from our sponsors.

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Yeah. When you were saying a few things from that story, I was thinking of myself, like how when someone tells you not to do something or you can't do something, it almost makes you want to do it more.

Lisa:
Absolutely, and I'm a fairly extroverted person and I'm not really great at being told to sit down and shut up. That doesn't really work well for me so I didn't really fit in very well with that sort of, it was very old, southern, male dominated, everybody in the corporate office wore a suit and tie. The head of the company still wore a hat when he went out. It was very conservative, very much an all white male situation. So that was interesting for me.

I'm Italian, but I'm mistaken for all sorts of ethnicities and it makes people super uncomfortable because they can't immediately identify what I am. You can kind of see them running through all the different possibilities in their head and I'm like, it doesn't matter, but I can tell you if it'll make you feel better. I was an oddity because I was a woman in tech, I'm sort of ambiguously misunderstood in terms of my racial identity and I came from some place that wasn't that town. So it was a tough row to hoe there for awhile.

Laurence:
Yeah, wow. I'm sure so many people can relate, at least to feeling isolated or that they don't fit in with the rest of the people they're working with. Of course that can happen in any job, not just tech jobs. At the same time, tech companies are very forward thinking and innovative and I'm sure even at that time.

Lisa:
Absolutely. And I think it had everything to do with it being this old family publishing company rather than a tech company. I spent some time down there and it was clear that my husband wasn't ever going to find work down there and things were not going to go well so I put in with a bunch of tech recruiters and found a job back where we had come from, back in North Carolina. We turned that around in two weeks. I got a job and we packed up the house and we moved everybody up here and got the kids enrolled in school and completely changed our lives in a very short amount of time.

I worked as a contractor on a very ill-fated, large government-adjacent project. I was on a team of four and we were the most high functioning team I've ever been a part of. We just instantly clicked and had this great chemistry, as a part of the most dysfunctional overall organization that I've ever seen in my life. That was a really interesting dichotomy too. I was the only girl on the team, and that's pretty much how I almost always am.

Laurence:
Yeah, oh man, wow. Now, I'm super jumping ahead. I know you work at New Media Campaigns. How long have you been there for?

Lisa:
I've been here for a year. I came from a job where I was a fullstack developer and now I'm just frontend, which is what I enjoy most. I still do some backend stuff. We write our templates are all in Twig which is a php based templating language. I still do some coding that's not just HTML and CSS. My primary focus is doing frontend work for a variety of content management systems.

Laurence:
You guys have different clients, correct? I was looking at the website, actually I'm on it right now.

Lisa:
We do. The campaign part came from, our very first clients were all political campaigns. The founders had come up with a way to get candidates online quickly, which was not something they had prior to that time. Their whole entrepreneurial spin was getting candidates online and fundraising fast. So we still do a lot of political campaigns, we do a lot of law firms, we do a lot of nonprofit work. Then we do a lot of work for the two largest universities in the area.

Laurence:
Nice. That's so great. Another thing that you mentioned when I first spoke with you is that you teach classes for Girl Develop It and the New York Code and Design Academy. How did you first get into that?

Lisa:
I was a teaching assistant for an AIGA event local here. They do a lot of outreach and they were having a designer developer bootcamp. So people who were just in graphic design were learning HTML and CSS. So I went out and helped them for a class and some people that worked at AIGA also were involved with Girl Develop It and they were like, "Hey, do you want to be a TA for us," and I was like, "Sure, I'll be a TA." I did that once and they were like, "Hey, how about if you teach instead," and I was like, "Sure, I'll totally teach, that would be fun." So I've been teaching the introductory HTML and CSS class and what they call beyond the basics, or intermediate HTML and CSS, for about two years now.

Laurence:
Yeah, that's so amazing. I think you learn things so much better when you teach other people. You've been doing this since the 90s, but I'm sure even someone with your experience, it's just so rewarding helping others learn, am I right?

Lisa:
It's amazing because our primary focus is people who have never coded before. It's people who are either transitioning in their careers or their deciding that they want to join the tech field and they've never had any experience before and to, in very short order, have them make something that they can see the results of, it doesn't take us very long to get a webpage up and going. That 'I made this' sense of accomplishment is huge.

Being able to help them with that is extremely gratifying. It's such a great job. I love the teaching part of it. It's so much fun.

Laurence:
How long have you been teaching there for then?

Lisa:
With Girl Develop It, about two years. I've done the introductory class I think four times now. We break it up into a quarter type system so I'll teach it and that class happens pretty frequently. We try to move it around geographically. When we want to have it on this end of town, I teach it. Then we had a two-day version, a compressed weekend version of it in Durham so other people could attend. I've done it several times. Then we also have a curriculum sprint every year where we refine and redo the curriculum to make sure that it's still up to date and the examples are good and there's no typos. I've been working on both the introductory and intermediate curriculum throughout that whole time as well.

Laurence:
So, do you have any advice to someone who wants to begin teaching or volunteering but maybe they're newer and maybe they're a little hesitant, they don't feel like they're ready. Is there anything you could share about that?

Lisa:
Absolutely. In fact, I was at the All Things Open conference today and I was manning the Girl Develop It booth and this was my advice to pretty much everyone who asked that questions. Come and be a TA, even if you don't have a ton of experience in that subject area, helping someone else go through a code example will help you learn it as well. It will reinforce any ideas that you have, and it's a great way to see how the class functions, it's a great way to reinforce your own skills as well as help other people. Then, once you've TA'd, you've gotten the material from that class without A, having to pay for it and B, having to expend a lot of effort. You're just sort of absorbing it as you help other people.

So it's a great way to just see if you like the technology side of it. It's a great way to give back, and you really don't have to have a ton of that subject knowledge. Basically it's just standing over people's shoulders and saying, "Hey, you missed a closing bracket there, that tag should go here." My philosophy of teaching is 'I only have to be one lesson ahead of whoever I'm teaching.' You don't have to have a huge breadth of knowledge, you just have to know what you need to know that night and you can get it done.

Laurence:
Nice. So sort of on the flip side then, because you are a self taught coder, you don't have formal academic training, is there any advice you can give to other people who are teaching themselves and are not getting a degree in computer science?

Lisa:
My philosophy was always, 'tell me the thing you want me to learn and give me a project to do it on and I will make that happen for you.' I learn best when I have a practical application for a thing. I tell my students in the html class not to let their skills get rusty but, ask anybody they know to build a webpage for them. It doesn't have to be perfect or flawless, but they didn't have a webpage before and they do now. Just using those skills and using them in real world situations. You can do as many tutorials as you want, but until you have to do that in a situation where someone else is going to be looking at it or using it, I feel like you probably don't get that same kind of dedication to the code. Maybe I learn better under pressure, but it feels better to me to have a destination when I'm trying to learn something new.

Laurence:
Yeah, totally agree. I always tell people to learn by doing projects and, if possible, freelance, because if you can make money while you learn, that's even better. Even if it's a very small amount.

Lisa:
Exactly. That's exactly correct.

Laurence:
I love kind of having that pressure and I also tell people to set deadlines for things. Of course if you're doing it for a client you automatically have a deadline but even if it's for yourself, like you want to build your portfolio site or maybe some little web app, to give yourself a due date of when you'll have it online by.

Lisa:
Exactly. If you treat all these interactions like you have a client who's expecting something from you, I feel like you work to a different standard. Not that if I were just doing it for myself I'd be like, "That's fine if this doesn't work exactly right," but if it's for a client, I'm going to keep on that until I find the answer that is correct. For me, I enjoy solving those kind of problems, I find it soothing. I had some very large, scary life issues happening, but when I was working with the code, I could always control it. For me, it's a kind of a respite from anything else that's going on in my life or in the world. I can just focus in on the work. It always does what I tell it to do, and it will only do what I tell it to do and nothing else. It's pretty reliable that way.

Laurence:
Yeah, I love that. Control the code, that's great. As someone who's so experienced, so many years being a web developer, is there any kind of parting advice or insights you could share with those who are just starting out?

Lisa:
I think always be willing to learn. The reason I'm still employed now is because whatever is on the horizon I'm willing to pick it up and take it on. You want me to learn PHP? Fine, awesome. I learned LESS and Sass for this job and I learned Twig templating. Everything you learn from a previous job you can apply to the next job and it will help move you forward. You just never stop learning and you will always be employed.

Laurence:
That's amazing. I love that. Always keep learning, you'll always be employed. I absolutely love it. Last question, where can people find you online?

Lisa:
I'm on Twitter as @LisaDSmith and my website is smithwebsmith.com, it's a silly little pun, like Bond, James Bond. You can find me obviously at newmediacampaigns.com and I'm never not online, so hit me up and I will respond.

Laurence:
Thank you, thank you so much Lisa.

Lisa:
You're welcome, thank you Laurence. This has been great.

Laurence:
I hope you enjoyed our conversation. Make sure to head over to my website, learntocodewith.me, where you can find even more awesome code-related content, like my 10 Free Tips for Teaching Yourself How to Code.

Again, the Show Notes for this episode, plus a full transcript, can be found at learntocodewith.me/podcast. If you're listening to this episode in the future, simply click the search icon in the upper portion of the page and type in the name Lisa Smith. This episode should appear first. Thanks so much for tuning in and I'll see you next week.

SPECIAL THANKS TO THIS EPISODE’S SPONSOR

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Key takeaways:

  • Teaching others is a great way to reinforce your current knowledge. Helping someone else solve a problem can give you greater insight.
  • You don’t have to know everything to help others learn to code. You only need to be one lesson ahead of whoever you’re teaching.
  • Many people learn best when there is a practical application for the lesson. Reach out to people who need help and find ways to use your skills in real world situations.
  • It helps to have a destination in mind when you’re trying to learn something new. You will have a better dedication to the code if there are clear expectations about the project.
  • Treat your interactions as if you have a client who is expecting something from you. It will help you work to a higher standard.
  • Coding can be a respite from difficult situations. Focus on the work. Take comfort in the fact that the code is under your control.
  • Always be willing to learn. Everything you learn from a previous job will help move you forward. Never stop learning and you will always be employed.

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