Abbie Howell

"From the personality types quiz, I got 3 results: communicator, coordinator, and trainer. The traits of these that I feel most fit me are:* Understands the audience and the importance of communicating information to different people* Good with words and languages* Good with words and numbers* Good at simplifying complex information* Good listener* Emphatic* Open minded* Good at communicating what people want* Works well with others* Willing to help when needed* Patient & Compassionate* Understanding and helpful* Understands how people learn differently* Thrives on helping others improveI feel that I get a lot of opportunities in my job to help and support others in learning and growing, which is something I am passionate about."

"I am a software developer at Theodo UK. This involves mainly coding in React/React Native and Django, though we have a range of clients with different tech stacks. Our clients come to us at different stages in their business and we help them to develop an MVP (minimum viable product) in record time. We have some big clients and some small clients. What I most enjoy about my job is having an impact on the client's business. We challenge their business model, what features they need, what is good UI/UX for their customers, and more. From day one I've had the freedom to say to Chief Executives of companies \"I don't think what you're doing is best for your company, why not try this instead?\" We work in small scrum teams and day-to-day we have a lot of fun and freedom. The starting salary is £36k.When I interviewed for the position there were no other women developers working there. When I joined there was one other. Now there are three of us. We are very close knit and support each other. I know the importance of women mentors and role models in a male dominated industry which is why the three of us launched EMBOLDEN_HER, an initiative to help women in tech in London. We run workshops, panels, and weekly one-on-one pairings."

"I grew up in North-West London with my disabled single mother and three sisters. It was not an easy childhood but I had the support of a close knit family and some great teachers. Coming from a family where nobody had been to university or even achieved A-Levels, I didn't think I would end up at a top uni or even go to uni at all. This was until some inspiring teachers noticed my potential and encouraged me. I went on to be the first person ever at my school to achieve 3 A*s at A-Level, and go on to study Computing at Imperial College London, a course which had only 10% of its students being women.The Royal Television Society technology bursary supported me throughout my degree. The extra money really allowed me to focus on my studies and not have to work whilst at uni. Over my first summer at uni the bursary scheme ran a two week tour around many television companies to see how their engineers work, allowing me to network and make connections. This was invaluable to me. There are many people who have connections through their family which allow them to find internships but coming from the background I did I had none. Thanks to the summer tour, for my second summer at uni I managed to secure a great internship at Sky as a developer working on writing a suite to test the quality of their internet video streams. I learnt so much about writing code for a big company and about how streaming over the internet works."

"In my free time, I love to bake, play videogames on my PC, and paint. I play mixed gender tag rugby once a week and do yoga once a week at work. At uni I did belly dancing."

"On a usual day, I come into work at 9:30am, get a coffee, do a daily standup (as a scrum team we each go over what we did yesterday, what we will do today, and any problems we had or foresee), do tickets until lunchtime (a ticket is a feature defined as a user story e.g. \"as a user on the sign in page I can see a submit button which when clicked takes me to the home page.\"), have an hour lunch, do some more tickets, maybe some meetings (problem solving, coaching, discussing how to grow my women in tech initiative, etc.), and my day finishes at 6:30pm."

"1st class BEng Computing from Imperial College London.A Levels:- Maths A*- Further Maths A*- Computing A*AS Levels:- Psychology A"