You Code Like a Girl? Thanks, I Know.

I wrote my first lines of code in a battered notebook at age ten. Not on a screen. In ink. Tabs drawn with a ruler, curly braces penned with intent. Was it syntactically correct? Absolutely not. But I was building something, cause I just learned how algorithms work and I wanted to make one of my own (I think I was trying to structurize my summer holiday plan. Or something.)

The idea that I’d become a frontend developer one day wasn’t revolutionary. At least not in my house. My parents didn’t flinch when I said I wanted to “make websites for games” instead of playing house or collecting stickers. My cousins? Cheered me on. My grandmother? Crocheted me a scarf with binary on it (true story). No one rolled their eyes or said, “But honey, that’s a boy’s job.”

Well — almost no one.

In my second year of university, during a lecture on data structures, one of my professors looked me in the eye and said:

“You should consider switching majors. Software development isn’t really for women.”

Oh, the irony. He was debugging his projector for 15 minutes that day. I helped him fix it.

Thankfully, he was a statistical outlier in an otherwise supportive environment. One of my biggest inspirations at university was a professor named Dr. Meena Kapoor. She had silver hair, spoke in algorithms, and could out-code every person in that lecture hall. She once told us:

“I didn’t learn to program until I was 53. My fingers were slower, but my logic was fire.”

She taught us recursion by baking samosas — don’t ask, but it worked. I adored her, I was inspired by her. She somehow reminded me of my father: he also used hilarious examples to teach me physics and math. She debugged with the calm of a monk and the precision of a sniper. And she never once made us feel that tech had a gender. Just a logic gate.

Now, years later, I work as a frontend developer with a thing for clean design, semantic HTML, and React code that reads like poetry. I’m currently helping optimize interfaces so users don’t rage-quit before clicking “Sign Up.” And yeah, I still get called “sir” in dev chats sometimes. It doesn’t bother me, though, cause I know the truth.

Here’s what I wish more people realized:

Tech doesn’t care what your voice sounds like.
JavaScript won’t judge your mascara.
You don’t need permission to build cool things.

The hashtag #WomenWhoTech isn’t about proving we exist. It’s about reminding the world we’ve always been here. In the background, in the foreground, writing code, fixing bugs, and yes — sometimes still getting mistaken for interns.

But we’re not going anywhere. We’re pushing commits. We’re leading teams. We’re rewriting the rules.

And occasionally, we still draw curly braces in notebooks. Just for old times’ sake.