Exercism Community Stories

Don’t be too productive with Franziska Obbarius

Franziska lives in Germany and has a full-remote position as a Senior Software Engineer at Atlassian (the company behind Jira, Confluence and Trello). She works on Go services for a new product called "Jira Product Discovery". It aims to support product managers with their work and is currently in public beta.
 
Before joining Atlassian, Franziska worked as developer (Node.js, Go, Vue.js) and tech lead at small companies around Frankfurt, Germany. Franziska spends her free time with her husband and daughter and helps out on Exercism as a maintainer for the Go and JavaScript track (username junedev). Because of her passion for teaching, she put a lot of effort into creating and improving the syllabus for those tracks.

Problem solving your way into being a tech lead with Gabriel Nelle

Gabriel Nelle is living in South Germany near Baden-Baden. He’s sharing the apartment with his girlfriend and two cats. He studied to be a teacher for mathematics and German at university in Siegen which he finished in 2008.
Since then he worked as a developer in the web-space mostly with JavaScript, PHP and Python. Early 2016 he switched to Go and has never looked back. At GoStudent he is part of building the No 1 global school as a staff engineer. His passion is simple, boring code. In his free time he likes to hike in the beautiful Black Forest.

ABAP and ABAP with Lars Hvam

Lars Hvam lives in Copenhagen, Denmark and loves the ABAP programming language. Having put together the ABAP track on Exercism, we caught up with Lars and had a chilled chat about how he ended up in tech.

Learning to code by telling the story of a program with Rebecca Mark

Rebecca Mark works for Unison Computing, where her mission is to make learning the Unison programming language as fun and accessible as can be. She started programming after a career in education; her favorite question from a student has been, “Is Rebecca a real grown-up?” to which her answer is another question: “Does that exist?” She started studying web development between sandwich bites on her lunch break.
 
Later, she was a member of the second cohort of the Ada Developers Academy, where she learned the importance of holding the door open for others when it comes to entering the tech industry. Since that time she’s worked on software projects big and small, and has come to love functional programming and creating tech communities. Every day she wakes up and learns something new from her brainy coworkers and the stellar Unison community.Her degree was in English Literature, and yes, she does think it is relevant to programming. In a different world she might have gone on to study poetics and convince future reluctant readers that it’s worth it to struggle through a poem.
 
Roll the dice again and in that universe she might have stayed in education, working with a focus on social justice. In this world, she’s grateful she gets to convince future Unison programers that there is a lot of joy to be found in learning a new programming language ecosystem or contending with a new functional effect management system.If you aren’t careful she’ll tell you all about her favorite poetic form (the sestina), her dogs (Kirby and Picasso), and her love of making pottery (you should go touch mud)!