Welcome to the Code Movie podcast.

We talked to people on their coding journey, notes of helping you on yours.

I'm your host, Ron, and today we're talking about how to build tech for social justice

with Alex Chen, co-founder and CEO of Emergent Works.

You know, that kind of epiphany launched me on this new direction of, this is not okay.

This is not the world that I want to be a part of, and I'm going to work to change it.

Alex talks about the challenges she had to face being a woman in tech, how shaving her head

caused people to treat her with more

respect and launched her on a path towards social justice. And her company's first in-house app,

not 911. After this. Thanks so much for being here. Thank you for having me.

So earlier this season, we had the privilege of speaking to a formally incarcerated person who spent 18 years in prison before getting out.

And then when he got out, he learned how to code and is now doing really well after struggling to get a job with a felony on his record.

And so we wanted to have you on the show because you do a lot at Emergent Works

to help formerly incarcerated people find careers in tech.

But before we get into all that, I want to hear about how you started your coding journey.

Where did it all begin for you?

I think technically the first piece of code that I wrote was for my Ti-89 calculator.

Nice.

Junior year of high school, perhaps.

It was like a program that like calculated the factorial of X or something.

But really it began in college. Freshman year of college, I wanted to be an

astronaut. So I enrolled in the engineering program at my school. And one of the requirements for the

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