Introducing Software Developer for Technical Content, Mia Adjei

Introducing Software Developer for Technical Content, Mia Adjei

Ahoy there! Let me tell you a story.

Once upon a time, there was a young child with a mind full of questions. "Why are there no parrots in the trees in our neighborhood? How are pencils made? Why do we have winter here when other people are having summer?”

I was that child, and every day I quested for answers. I asked all the people around me and usually spent hours in the public library voraciously reading everything I could get my hands on. If the answer did not reveal itself even after that, I often tried out small experiments to see if I could figure out a solution on my own.

Every day a new question

As far back as I can remember, I've always been a questioner and I’ve always been elated when I learned the answers to my questions. Childhood was filled with discoveries and "aha!" moments. Many times, after finding out something new, you could find me on the playground excitedly telling all my friends what I’d learned.

Don’t you love the feeling of developing a new understanding or making something work for the first time? There’s just something great about that feeling of satisfaction and success. Oftentimes, this satisfaction leads to a desire to learn even more through discovery. The process continues.

Sharing moments of discovery

Sharing moments of learning and discovery with the people around me has been a throughline across most of my life and work. My questions evolved from the wonderings of a child into the “what ifs” of an adult with agency. I asked myself, “What if I become a teacher so I can help children feel the joy of learning that I felt?” So I started my career as a teacher, and every day, I worked with children and saw their faces light up at learning something new.

After a few years I started to ask, “What if I could help people learn beyond my own classroom?” So I transitioned into working with print and e-books, editing and arranging them to share the enjoyment of reading and learning with the world. But of course, this led me to other questions about the code behind it all. I wanted to know how e-books actually worked and also how I might build other sorts of things. This led me to the path of becoming a software engineer.

Every day as a software engineer, I was learning something new or building something interesting and useful. I kept detailed notes, at first for myself so I wouldn’t forget things, but eventually I started sharing more of what I knew with others on my team, helping them to get up and running with their code as well. Of course this, in time, led me to a new question: what if I could bring together my code knowledge with my teaching experience and share it with an even larger number of people?

What will you share with the world?

Code is an exciting, creative tool that you can use to change the world around you. I’m excited to be here at Twilio and to share interesting and useful posts to help you bring your projects to life and explore your own questions.

And if you have a project you’d like to write about and share with our community or the world, please reach out! I can't wait to see what you build!

Mia Adjei is a Software Developer on the Developer Voices team. They love to help developers build out new project ideas and discover aha moments. Mia can be reached at madjei [at] twilio.com.