Introducing Sarah Withee

Sarah is a polyglot software engineer, public speaker, teacher and mentor, and hardware and robot tinkerer from the Midwest.

Show Notes

Website | sarahwithee.com

Twitter | @geekygirlSarah

Episode Transcript

Liam: This is Hallway Chats, where we talk with some of the unique people in and around WordPress.

Tara: Together, we meet and chat with folks you may not know about in our community.

Liam: With our guests, we’ll explore stories of living – and of making a living with WordPress.

Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is episode 29.

Tara: Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Tara Claeys.

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today, we’re joined by Sarah Withee. Sarah is a polyglot software engineer, a public speaker, a teacher, and a mentor. She’s a hardware and robot tinkerer from the mid-west. She has always loved programming and technology for as long as she can remember. She lives up to her Twitter username. Hey, Sarah.

Sarah: Hi, how are you guys?

Tara: Hey Sarah, we’re great. It’s great to have you on the show, welcome. Would you just take a few minutes to tell us a little bit more about yourself and, of course, now we’re really curious to share what is your Twitter username?

Sarah: My Twitter username is @geekygirlSarah, there’s been some times when I guess some people have doubted this and once they find out, they follow me and I’m about as geeky as I sound. They’re a little surprised sometimes. I’ve been a software developer professionally for several years but when I was a little kid, I started to learn how to program on my Commodore 64 which I think dates me a little bit. But I just found it fascinating, I could type in these little commands and the thing would just do whatever I told it to, and I could build up bigger and bigger things, and do fancier stuff. It just always fascinated me. Little baby nerd me was like, “I want to do this when I grow up. I want to be a computer programmer.” I figured out in college that most people don’t actually know what they want to do. They get little ideas as kid and don’t ever follow through with being a firefighter or an astronaut or whatever. I guess I was kind of lucky in that sense. But I still love it, it still fascinates me every day. I just have always loved programming.

Tara: Wow. So you started back a few years ago and you’re following your dream but I imagine that what your job or what you do in tails of technology is very different from what you would have imagined with that Commodore 64. How have you grown and evolved with the amazing changes that have happened in programming and technology and geek stuff?

Sarah: Good question. Back then, obviously, computers were kind of a novelty to have in your home. I remember we had a computer lab in our school with 30 computers and that was it. Now there’s just computers everywhere. I have several on my desk in the form of cellphones and tablets and everything. It’s still cool that when I was young, these fascinated me because it’s magical little boxes that did things. Nowadays, we kind of have bigger and faster and better things that can go way above and beyond what we ever could have imagined, but it’s still fascinating that somewhere some computer can listen to me talk and figure out what I’m saying, and all these other different cool things we can do with technology. I guess just as I’ve learned more and computers have evolved more, there continues to be this sort of road that you keep wanting to go down and just learn more and more of all the things.

I am with a medical research institute at the moment and we have different scien...