In this episode we have a fascinating conversation with Lisa Karlin Curtis, API Engineer at GoCardless. Lisa shares her extraordinary journey from management consultancy to her current role, explaining how she accidentally became an engineer when a new job took an unexpected turn. Lisa shares her insights on life as an engineer, work structures and diversity issues in her sector. Plus, she explains the interesting concept of ‘glue work’.

We also cover:

• Why coding is such a rewarding and exciting role
  
• What the term distributed system means
  
• What start-ups can learn from enterprises – and vice versa
  
• The problem with career progression in the engineering sector
  
• How we can start overcoming the lack of diversity in engineering roles
  
• Why encouraging adults into engineering is just as important as getting girls into coding.
  
• Plus, loads more.
  

Lisa wraps up by giving advice to those who may (or may not) be considering a role in engineering.

Further information:

You can find Lisa’s blog at https://paprikati.github.io

Lisa is speaking at the Euruko conference, which is running on 28 and 29th May 2021: https://euruko2021.org/

You can read more about Tanya Reilly’s concept of Glue Work here https://www.slideshare.net/TanyaReilly/being-glue and here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KClAPipnKqw

Learning to code:

This is the platform Lisa used: https://www.codecademy.com

Find information on coding mentors here: https://exercism.io

The coding bootcamp that Lisa mentioned is: https://makers.tech (there are many more)

Lisa also gave us this introduction to distributed systems if you’d like to read more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_computing#:~:text=A%20distributed%20system%20is%20a,to%20achieve%20a%20common%20goal.