Amina Adewusi

In just over a year, Amina Adewusi went from teaching herself how to code to joining the engineering team at Guardian News & Media and speaking at industry events. Here she tells us about her inspirational journey and why we should all encourage diversity in developers

- Oliver Lindberg

Amina Adewusi was living her dream. As an independent investment analyst working across sub-Saharan Africa, she travelled frequently. When she and her husband decided to start a family, Adewusi remained optimistic that she could continue that work. But soon after becoming a mother at the end of 2017, the reality hit that her lifestyle wasn’t sustainable. Her baby needed a lot of her attention and energy. Accepting that she had to find a job that allowed her more flexibility, Adewusi googled ‘work from home’ and discovered that 80 per cent of the jobs that looked attractive to her were for software engineers. Adewusi, however, had no development experience.

She began researching coding bootcamps and found a lot in her hometown of London but they weren’t accessible to her. “My son was still very young and I wasn’t getting any sleep,” Adewusi remembers. “So the thought of going to a bootcamp Monday to Friday, nine to five, was absolutely impossible. Nevertheless I’m still really grateful that bootcamps exist because I benefited from their positive marketing material. It made me believe that I could do it. I chose to start learning Ruby as my first programming language because one of the bootcamps was advising it and had some materials on their website. I believe as long as you learn one language you can transpose that knowledge into others.”