From Education to Engineering at Etsy
Meet Adrienne, Turing Alum
Graduated June 2016
Hired July 2016
Now works as a Senior Software Engineer at Etsy
Turing students love to learn. One such student, Adrienne Domingus, looked to software development as an antidote to stagnation in her earlier career in education. It worked! Being a developer allows her to shift her focus and learn new things, build features that make people’s lives easier, and blend her technical problem-solving abilities with ones that side human.
“Our previous professional and lived experiences give us unique perspectives and cross-functional skills.”
Building software is an exceptionally collaborative endeavor and having had exposure to a variety of people and life experiences helps. At Etsy, Adrienne works on one of the marketing tech teams that builds data pipelines and APIs to populate and personalize marketing materials for buyers. Consistency is key. She lives and breathes by routines and habits—processes put in place during her time at Turing.
“Turing grads have strong technical chops and a willingness to jump into the unknown.”
It goes beyond an incredibly solid technical foundation. In her own words, “Turing is where I learned to learn and that’s the only constant in software.” Case in point: though Turing introduced Adrienne to concepts in web development using Ruby on Rails, her first job at a startup used a different tech stack (Python/Django/Postgres/Kafka) and her current role at Etsy uses yet another tech stack (PHP/MySQL/Kafka), but it’s never slowed her down. “A Turing grad will learn what needs to be learned and get the work done. Seriously, even if we’ve never used your tech before, we’ll figure it out,” she says.
“Turing encouraged us to think about the industry as a whole and how we can make it more welcoming and just.”
On making an impact, it’s the human kind that matters most to Adrienne. “The opportunity to work in tech can be transformational, and it’s important to me to continue to open those doors behind me.” She mentors younger developers and organizes a chapter of Write/Speak/Code in her native Seattle, whose mission is to increase the visibility and leadership of technologists with marginalized genders—trans people of any gender, non-binary people, and women.