I began coding because...

I've been fascinated by computers and how they work from a very early age. I wanted to know how and why they work. I remember searching about it on my father's laptop when I was in 6th grade. I bunch of random stuff came up, including a PDF with a ton of complicated stuff. I didn't understand any of it then, but that's when I decided to dig deeper and find out someday. My first tryst with computers was in the form of algorithms in 8th grade. I just fell in love with how logical it was. I found myself hooked on it super quickly. From there, I went on to take CS as my elective in 9th grade where we were taught Java. The first program I ever wrote, a "Hello World" obviously -- when it worked after a bunch of silly syntax errors, my joy knew no bounds. I still remember the feeling very distinctly and till date it is one of my most cherished memories.

I'm currently hacking on...

I'm currently working on web-ext. It was my Outreachy project as well and I plan to continue working on it. Apart from that I'm interning at Red Hat right now. There I am working on a project in the devtools space mostly in Python.

I'm excited about...

Learning new things! I'm going to start my first job as a software engineer this year. I'm incredibly excited about that. As I just beginning my career, I want to explore everything and anything I can and not corner myself into using a particular technology or set of tools. There is so much to do in this field that it certainly gets overwhelming, but I am very excited and eager to learn as much as I can!

My advice for other women who code is...

One thing I'd like to tell all the ladies out there is — don't conform. No matter what happens, do your own thing. If it goes right, the benefits are yours to reap. If it goes wrong, you're to be blamed and you can't pin it on anyone else. Don't listen to what the society has to say about how women should & shouldn't behave. It's your life, live it ONLY on YOUR own terms, not someone else's. Don't try to fit into a someone else's description of you & your life. If your career & financial independence is of utmost importance to you, give it everything you got & don't let anyone make you feel bad about it just because you're a woman.
Every time I feel discouraged by a sexist comment someone randomly tries to pass as a "joke" or someone tries to discourage me because of my gender, I just think of the reason I got into tech and why I am here -- the idea of building things that can be useful to people with just words, i.e., lines of code is utterly exciting to me. I want to help simplify the lives of folks around me through code. I want to be a badass software engineer and I'm not ready to back down any time soon.