What is your name and location?

What's your background?

I first started building websites when I was 12, then I studied computer science at university after school and got a job as a software engineer building web and mobile apps. I worked as a software engineer for several years before moving into leadership roles leading technical teams.

What inspired you to become a manager in a startup?

I had a lot of fun building great products with amazing people. I then started working in technical lead roles and later on in team lead roles. I love seeing my team learn and grow each day, they inspire me! Working with an amazingly smart team makes me incredibly happy.

Please walk me through your day, what do you do at your company?

Many of our team are remote so we stay in touch via Slack and Google Hangouts.

We work in a fast-paced environment where we are helping developers across the world 24/7. I have a fantastic leader who supports our team and we are all constantly thinking of how we can make improvements. There are over 5 million droplets across 10 data centers all over the world.

Can you see yourself in ten years doing the same thing you do now?

In 10 years I would like to still be leading technical teams. I'm constantly learning and growing and I hope in 10 years I will be a far better leader than I am today. I'm also interested in obtaining additional technical certificates for Linux, Networking, Security, Incident Management and more.

What is the best advice you ever received?

To bring your whole self to work each day and to be an authentic leader. To be an authentic leader you need to have excellent self-awareness. I feel that doing the VIA strengths survey has greatly helped me.

"Authentic leaders demonstrate a passion for their purpose, practice their values consistently, and lead with their hearts as well as their heads. They establish long-term, meaningful relationships and have the self-discipline to get results. They know who they are."

What is the most important thing you’ve learned in the last year?

Taking time to reflect, to set goals and to work hard to achieve those goals is always going to work well.

And what are your plans for the future?

To continue to work with DigitalOcean to create a cloud infrastructure experience that developers love.

If you could do one thing differently, what would it be?

I would like to figure out how to help give young people more opportunities to create their own startups. I'm not sure how to solve that right now, but it's something I'm thinking about.

Any advice for your local/global Geekettes?

NYC Geekettes is awesome, I love going to the events. I really recommend going along and meeting all the amazing members! I'm excited to see NYC Geekettes grow over the next year and into the future.