Welcome to the Code to be podcast where we talk to people on their coding journey and helps of helping you on yours.

I'm your host, Saron, and today we're talking about having a growth mindset with Tanya Riley, senior principal engineer at Squarespace.

Pick a role where the people are both people.

You're interviewing the team as much as they're interviewing you.

You're interviewing the manager as much as they're interviewing you.

Look for a role where you will learn something kind of by default.

Don't pick a job you're good at.

Pick a job you want to be good at.

Tanya talks about her journey into code, recognizing

limitations and challenging ourselves to learn at any stage of our coding journey. After this,

thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for having me. So what got you into learning to code?

So this is a ridiculous story.

But when I was a teenager, I read this thriller by Michael Crichton called Disclosure,

and it's about corporate nonsense and harassment in the workplace and so on.

But there was one character in that book who was a programmer.

And I read about this one character,

probably not even a main character, but they had written something that at the time was super

futuristic, like it was a virtual reality file system. It was very metaverse. And it was the coolest

thing I had ever read in my entire life, this one character, because he had these Easter eggs in it

where if someone said his name, it would say he was cool or something. And I was like, that's what I

want to do, virtual reality file systems. Whatever that is. I just thought it would be cool.

And I didn't know anything about programming. But I just knew that, oh yeah, that's what I want to do. Well, my high school

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