Good morning!

This month’s newsletter has a somewhat different format than the previous one. To celebrate the International Women’s Day on the 8th of March, some of our developers participated in the #shecoded campaign by the amazing Dev.to community - this campaign shares experiences from women and non-binary developers about the hardships and discrimination that they have faced in the IT industry, and their determination, despite the difficulties, to keep on coding.

Dear readers!

As Juhis said above, this month’s newsletter is a bit different. The content is not curated by one person but produced by several people. We are all developers who work at Futurice. We are also women.

Minja is a mobile, virtual reality and game developer.

Eevis is a full stack developer, who is passionate about frontend development, like React, GraphQL and accessibility.

Senja is a front end developer, who loves working with styles, animations and microinteractions, and design systems.

We decided to write about our experiences as women developers under the #shecoded hashtag on Dev.to. During previous years, we have read amazing and heartbreaking posts by other developers, and this year, we wanted to make an impact by sharing ours.

Our stories, experiences and careers vary from another, but there are clearly some themes that we all have encountered.

We hope that our posts and others from the #shecoded campaign will give new knowledge and insight to non-women developers about what it is like to become and be a woman developer. (And if you haven’t followed this hashtag before, be warned: people are writing frankly and openly about very difficult situations and feelings.) We also hope that these will remind other women developers out there, that you are not alone, and that we’re cheering you on to keep coding.

(We also want to point out that at Futurice, diversity isn’t just about talking about gender equality issues. We talk about cultural differences, what kind of disabilities there are, what systemic racism is, etc. So, it’s not that we talk only about gender related issues, we are just talking about these especially during this month.)

On behalf of all women developers at Futurice,
Yours sincerely, Minja, Eevis and Senja

Our Stories

Nevertheless, Minja coded

Minja writes about the most common frustrations that women developers face throughout their careers: expectations to do meta work, facilitation or (at worst) office housekeeping instead of contributing to programming, unwelcome flirting and unequal pay.

Nevertheless, Minja kept on coding and will continue to do so.

Nevertheless, Eevis keeps on coding

Having participated in this campaign before, Eevis goes a lot deeper in her blog post this year. She shares an accident that has affected her work and how it has created additional challenges on top of the gender discrimination.

Nevertheless, Eevis keeps on coding.

Nevertheless, Senja coded 

Senja writes about learning programming and shares situations chronological from highschool to work-life. Most situations are related to her feelings of uncertainty, but others are related to other people and their behaviour.

Nevertheless, Senja, too, will keep on coding.

Cool new things in Apollo Client 3.0

If you have worked with GraphQL and React, you’ve probably used Apollo Client as the GraphQL client library. For those who aren't familiar with it, Apollo Client is a comprehensive GraphQL client library providing features for state management, caching, and data management in the frontend.

In July 2020, version 3.0 was released, and it brought some new features, especially to state management. In this Tech Weeklies talk, Eeva-Jonna Panula introduces some of these features.

Jobs

Senior Full-stack Developer | Helsinki

Being a full-stack developer is mostly about solving problems. Often it means asking a lot of questions to figure out the right problem to solve.

Read more >>

Upgrade your tech stack | Helsinki & Tampere

Are you looking for a new technology stack to build your expertise? Or do you have an interest in data engineering? If you’re a tech expert who’d love to find a new direction to continue working hands-on, our Stack Upgrade program might just be the right fit. Power up your career by leveling up. Apply for a position at Helsinki or Tampere today.

At Helsinki >>                                  At Tampere >>