 Yup, that's me. My name is Sophia Leone and I'm currently a developer programs engineer at Google. You're probably wondering how I ended up in the situation. Let me explain. Four years ago, I graduated college with a degree in philosophy and no intention of using my major. After college, I got a job in sales at Google, which gave me my first glimpse into the tech industry, but more importantly computer science. I was hooked. So back to today. I successfully transitioned careers and landed a job where my first project was to build a GitHub application that automatically merged pull requests once tests and reviews had all passed. Building a GitHub application and transitioning careers are eerily similar. So I'll talk about both here. So how do you actually do the thing? Step one, consult knowledgeable people. My first step in designing the bot was to investigate the previous attempts at the solution and more importantly why they failed. Similarly, when I began my career transition, I conducted LinkedIn research to find people who were working in computer science with non traditional backgrounds and to ask them about their experience in the transition. Step two, build a plan that can fail fast. The first design of the GitHub application was that it would respond to tests passing for a given pull request. Turns out, not all GitHub tests emit events, so that implementation was scrapped quickly. Similarly, my first attempt at a career transition was to take the GRE quit my job and get a master's degree to transition, a risky and expensive solution that I scrapped when a better opportunity came along. Step three, absorb information for the sake of absorbing information. It will open up new opportunities in your project. While I was building my GitHub application, I built another bot that labeled issues in our team's GitHub repositories. That project taught me how to get our GitHub application to talk to Google Cloud Platform, which then helped me create a solution to trigger my other bot. Similarly, before my career transition, I started volunteering to analyze our sales data using SQL. Even though it wasn't related to the computer science classes I was taking or to my job, I was eventually able to use this work as examples for my ladder transfer. Step four, get a catalyst. Get someone to give you a chance. I know this is a hard thing to do, so I'll return to this point a little later. For the bot, it was the moment in which the team was willing to install it on their repos for further refinement, despite their fears that it would merge on sanitized code. In my career, it was the developer residency program, an inaugural program at Google designed to help highly motivated people with nontraditional backgrounds transition into becoming developer program engineers. Step five, profit. Just kidding. Execute and iterate over and over and over again. As with any software, this bot's success has been entirely dependent on its ongoing maintenance. Similarly, making a career transition requires ongoing maintenance to fully grow into your role. So why should you care about this process and what can you do about it? Bots and people can both help provide diverse perspectives that ultimately improve the end product. The bot is singularly focused on one thing, and it's usually something humans miss frequently, like remembering to merge PRs when they're ready to go. Similarly, people can provide their distinct intellectual, social, and cultural perspective that others on the team might miss. Through their specialized perspectives, both bots and people can help you see your problem area in a more holistic and comprehensive way. Without belaboring the obvious, the tech industry is in dire need of diversity, specifically from women and minority groups. Studies have shown that the lack of diversity is partly caused by the fact that minority groups were not encouraged to consider a career in computing when they were younger. Chances are that those considering career changes into engineering, like me, are doing so because they weren't introduced to the field until much later in life. And, like me, this cohort of career transitioners will likely be able to provide diverse gender and cultural perspectives in addition to the diverse intellectual perspectives afforded by their previous career. This difference in representation ties back to the final point. It takes a village to build a bot, and it takes a village to make good developers for the community. In each step of the process to change careers, I leaned on the developer community for guidance, mentorship, patience, and most importantly, a chance. As current members of this developer community, you can participate in recruiting and developing incoming talent from other fields, genders, and cultures by lending advice, offering challenging opportunities, giving inexperienced and enthusiastic people a chance, being patient with their learning curve, and giving thoughtful, considerate, and genuine feedback. Perhaps most importantly, it means giving people who haven't been encouraged in the field before a yes when they most need it.