Meet the Team: Sylvana Santos, Codecademy Senior Software Engineer

Everybody’s career journey looks different — even the journeys of our own team members! That’s why we’re so excited to share stories and advice from Codecademy’s Software Engineers, Data Scientists, Product Managers, and more to show people what it’s like to work in tech.

Today we’re spotlighting Sylvana Santos , a Senior Software Engineer on Codecademy’s Teaching Assistance team who has been with us for four years.

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Tell us about yourself. Why were you drawn to engineering?

“I kind of bounced around from thing to thing until I figured out that software engineering is what I like to do. I always enjoyed STEM and I knew I wanted to do something with math or science. Naturally, when people were counseling me going into college, they were like, ‘Hey, you should do engineering.’

I went down the electrical engineering path and had to take a couple of coding classes as a part of the major. Those were the bits that I liked the most, the problem solving that was involved with the coding classes.

I finished out my major with electrical engineering and went into teaching. I worked at a museum teaching science, then I was brought to New York where I taught fifth-grade science at a charter school. I was the teacher that did volcano projects with kids.?

But all throughout my time teaching, I was still coding little projects and taking courses on the side. I just continued doing it because I really, really liked it. After a year at the charter school, I was like, ‘You know what? I want to actually try to make [coding] my career because it just feels like I have a desire to do so.’

Getting to work in the classroom felt so rewarding, but I wished there was a way for me to connect with more students than just the 30 students that are in the room with me. I saw software engineering as an opportunity to reach more people who maybe wouldn’t have those resources in their day-to-day.

I took the risk, and I did a bootcamp in New York, and then I got a Codecademy apprenticeship three months afterward. I remember when I was at the bootcamp, they asked us what our dream company was, and Codecademy was one of the companies that I named. I’m very grateful that I’m where I am. I’m living the dream.”

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What’s it like being a Senior Software Engineer at Codecademy?

“I work on a product team at Codecademy. As the name implies, we're working on the product. Most of what I do is update our code to either add a new feature or enhance an existing feature on our website. I’m also supporting others as they're changing the code, and working with Designers and Product Managers to figure out what features we are enhancing or adding. It's a very collaborative role.

I still don't get tired of the feeling of like, ‘Wow, this is actually going out to people, like people actually use these things.’ Every launch is exciting in a way but one thing that I've worked on that is the most rewarding is the mobile app.?The mobile app is well-loved by a large portion of our users, so whenever we can deliver on the things that they've been asking for, it's great. It’s definitely something that’s near and dear to my heart.

And then related, we recently released some changes to make a lot of our lessons more friendly on mobile devices as well. We’d been wanting to do that for so long and our PM (Product Manager) pushed that through. That has been a huge win too. We've seen a big increase in usage from mobile devices there. It’s really exciting to see that the changes are actually benefiting our learners.”

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"Knowing everything is not the measure of a good engineer. The best engineers are the ones who are effective learners."

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What’s one of the most challenging parts of being a Software Engineer?

?“One of the things that was surprising to me is the context switching that's involved in being a developer.

When you're learning, you're just focusing on one project at a time. But in the real world, you’re working on multiple projects at a time. And then, if reports are coming in from customer support, you have to deal with those. If there's an on-call issue, you have to deal with that.?

When you're working in a complex code base, it can be really hard to context switch and be like, ‘Okay, I'm looking at this whole new area of the code. Let me remind myself what's going on here.’ That can be pretty challenging.”

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What’s one of the most rewarding parts of being a Software Engineer??

“One of the rewarding parts of the job is that you're constantly learning. You get to learn from other talented people who are in a slightly different field as you —?like, I get to learn from Designers and Product Managers.

But at the same time, because you're constantly learning, it's easy to make yourself feel like, ‘I've been doing this for four years, and I still don't have it all figured out. When am I going to get good at this? Am I actually good at what I do?’

I also think that's the beauty of it: there's always going to be more to learn. With the collaborative nature of software engineering, there's always an exchange of knowledge happening and it's really great to be a part of that.

I try to remind myself that the best engineers are not the people who have been doing this for 15 years. Knowing everything is not the measure of a good engineer. The best engineers are the ones who are effective learners. It's how well do you adapt, how well do you learn things, how do you onboard to things.”??

Our team shares more advice for overcoming impostor syndrome here.

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What advice do you have for people interested in software engineering?

“When you’re right at the beginning and you don't know where to start, it can be overwhelming because there are so many tools and languages that Software Engineers use and have at their disposal. A lot of times, we're just overthinking it. Just pick any language and go with it. It's really not important which one you pick because once you learn one, it makes it a lot easier to learn other languages.

The other big thing is to remember that none of us have it figured out. If you're feeling like you’re not cut out for this, try your best to not listen to that little voice and that doubt in your head. Just take it one thing at a time and try to get better at feeling comfortable with not knowing. That's a part of the job and we all face that at some point.”

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What do you wish you knew before you began your career?

“I did a couple of research projects in college and while I was teaching that involved coding, but I felt like no recruiter or hiring manager was going to take these little side projects that I did seriously. I didn't have confidence in the things that I was building, just because I was the only one working on it and they were just little things that I did on the side.

But those projects are meaningful because they show that you’re able to build something and that you’re able to apply new skills, which is meaningful and can go on your resume. Just because a project you built wasn't shipped to millions of learners doesn't mean that it’s not a good indicator of the work that you can do. I wish I had a little bit more faith in the work I was doing early on.

Another thing that I was missing was doing more networking and asking people like, ‘Hey, what do you do? What are the skills that you need for your job?’ One thing that I found useful was getting involved with conferences and attending talks. It’s a great way to keep up to date on the skills that people in the industry are using and companies are looking for. And afterward, you can be like, ‘Hey, I attended your talk. I really enjoyed it. Thank you for sharing.’”

Some events Sylvana recommends include:

·????? React Global Summit: They have a senior track and a junior track.

·????? Typescript Congress: They host hands-on workshops which are a great way to learn!

·????? CodeMentor: A community that hosts events on diverse and interesting topics.

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What do you want to learn next?

“I'd love to get into game development a bit and try learning those new skills. And I had done a little bit of learning with like VR in the past. I'd love to get back into it; I think that would be a fun thing to learn.

For my day-to-day job, I would like to do a deep dive on machine learning. I’ve had an opportunity to learn some skills on the job —?like I did our prompt engineering course when I was working on one of our AI features. I feel like there's so much to learn within AI or machine learning that it would be a good next step for me.”

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What’s your favorite Codecademy course?

“When I first started at Codecademy, most of our back-end code is written in Ruby and I didn't know Ruby going in. So I actually did our Learn Ruby course when I first started at Codecademy.

And when I was working on our Handshake feature, I did the Learn SQL course because I had to do a little bit of work with the data science team on that project. So I wanted to level up my SQL skills.”

*Interview edited for clarity and length