Madelyn grew up in an immigrant neighborhood of New York City where she arrived with her single mom from the Dominican Republic. She attended a local public school that had the lowest college attendance rate in the city, and didn’t know if, or how, she would go to college because she didn’t have any role models. Then, with some hard independent study, she got a great SAT score and was encouraged to apply. It was only in her last college year that Madelyn became aware of computer science as a ?eld and software engineering as a career. She took online coding classes while ?nishing her degree, and after graduating, enrolled in a 10-month coding program that offered night classes so that her day job could cover the cost. Madelyn landed her ?rst software job before she even ?nished the program, and a few months into that ?rst job, she got her dream role at Pinterest. Madelyn will demonstrate in her talk the type of code she uses at Pinterest (which is based on Java) and the products it allows her to create.