Hiya 🙋🏻‍♀️

I'm Diana, a full-stack engineer who has been working in the tech industry for 5 years.

An experienced mentor, workshop leader and instructor, I've taught with Thinkful (a mentor-led career accelerator for people switching into high-tech careers), Code First: Girls (a UK-based social enterprise focused on increasing women in tech through education for university students & working professionals), and led workshops at some pretty awesome events (most recently, I spoke on Zero-to-Production with the Serverless Framework at Node+JS Interactive by the Linux Foundation in North America, and How to Think like a Data Scientist at Monzo's From Scratch Festival). I've seen 6 people through their own paths to success, written curriculums that improved retention, and am working on some pretty awesome new online courses 😉

Over the last few years, I've had very interesting work experiences from being the first hire in a fast-growing startup, being the only in-house developer, all the way to having worked on one of the most exciting teams (at the time) in a bank that's not too bad, tbh (treats their developers with respect). I've led integrations with payment platforms for B2C, as well as integrations with huge, legacy enterprise systems to gain larger clients in B2B. I've also led full-stack data-driven projects. I'm the person who lets product/commercial know what is or isn't possible, how long it will take, why, and then builds it.

Finally, I'm a strong proponent of the Compassionate Coding movement led by April Wensel, which looks to improve upon Clean Code methodologies and bring us collectively into the future 🔮✨

I'm particularly interested in mentoring people from underestimated, underrepresented backgrounds in technology, as a non-binary femme, queer, woman of colour, myself.
I'm also interested in mentoring people who identify as default identities (straight, white, male, etc.) who wish to be more authentic allies in tech, and wish to improve their own abilities to share knowledge inclusively. Come to me with questions, and let's share the adventure together. 🚀

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How I like to work:
I'm based in London (UK) in terms of timezone, and so if we're in a different timezone, I try to respond within 24h. For regular correspondence, the ideal time for me to be online is between 12pm and 10pm GMT. If I need more time (e.g. For things that need some deep thinking or code reviewing), I'll let you know as I would fit it around my work schedule.
And finally, as I usually charge an hourly rate for video mentorships on my freelance teaching with bootcamps, I offer a 45-60 min video call session every two weeks as part of my standard Mentorcruise offering.

Thank you 🙏🏼