P2P Series: Kaja Santro from Slacker to Ruby Hacker

The first rule of Feminist Fight Club is to talk about Feminist Fight Club. A radical slacker finds a future building software.

Today, Kaja Santro (LinkedIn, Portfolio) connects art lovers with lovable artists, as a platform engineer at Artsy, a Series-D based out of NYC.

In university, she loved learning about historical linguistics, but her inquisitive mind rejected the toxic gender dynamics and left her uninspired about a job in academia.

Kaja was unemployed when she met WordPress while helping her boyfriend. He ran out of money before the freelancer could finish the website for his hostel. That led to late nights Googling SEO, and a new hunger to learn. She found her tribe at Rails Girls in Berlin. Ruby is the most inclusive language, and she will fight you to prove it.

In our chat, we talk about Studio Ghibli, Moroccan partners, radical negotiations, mashed potatoes, open source, and the advantages of hedonistic priorities.

This episode is packed with insights about:

• (00:00:43) Princess Mononoke is a metaphor and an inspiration
• (00:11:07) Becoming a developer, but first historical linguistics
• (00:18:56) Toxic environment squeezes love out of anything
• (00:23:27) First exposure was practical WordPress
• (00:29:22) P2: Learn to code with zero f***s (thanks Rails Girls in Berlin)
• (00:36:29) Healthy learning and growth mindset required
• (00:42:11) Harness the inner hedonist
• (00:45:44) Get your bootcamp paid by the Arbeitsamt
• (00:54:54) Get lunch to clinch that job opening
• (00:57:38) P3 - The first job was magical (and problematic)
• (00:59:26) Ruby has inclusive values (Rails maybe not)
• (01:02:14) It's a lot of work to be the only woman in engineering
• (01:10:22) Claim your value, claim your salary
• (01:15:57) Find your dancing star (mentors take many forms)
• (01:20:24) Beware of pushing unpaid labor
• (01:26:10) Potatoes are the new smart food

Mentions:

• Read Feminist Fight Club
• Watch Coraline Ada Ehmke - The broken promise of Open Source
• Use Discourse, a free and open-source Internet forum software
• Eat at Osmans Töchter
• Learn to code at Career Foundry

Zeke Arany-Lucas is a principal engineer, coach, and consultant living and working in Berlin since 2014. He was previously a leader at Amazon and Microsoft, where he started his career building Internet Explorer. You can also follow him on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.

Artwork by Emre Aydogan & Laura Diezler — ©️2022 Zeke Arany-Lucas