Chapter One

Thank you so much for taking the time to interview with Chapter1! Let’s begin.

What initially drew you into programming and wanted you to pursue this as your professional career?

I was initially drawn to coding at a very young age. I used to hack around webpages on sites like Neopets, where I starting learning basic HTML and CSS and tried to understand basic encryption like PGP to sign messages around the age of eight years old.

I was never the best student in school. I always thought I was going to go into art and didn’t think I was very good at math. I never had an opportunity to learn about technology in a formal setting until college. Sophomore year of high school, I started trying to teach myself programming and created a simple quote of the day app in Android. After this I thought, "this tech stuff is cake! I could totally do this.” Interested, I talked to my friends with similar interests who were going into college as “computer science majors.”So I googled ‘Computer Science,' and I read the Wikipedia page, from which I was very intimidated, I saw words like ‘algorithms’ and ‘complexity theory,’ and thought, I would never be smart enough to do something like that.

However, I tried to not let that discourage me and never stopped being passionate for surfing the web and learning new things. Continuing my personal learning path, I ended up winning the National Center for Women and Information Technology Aspirations in Computing Award in Indiana in 2013 for my personal motivation towards technology. Winning this award helped me become confident in my computer skills and allowed me to identify as a “computer scientist” for the first time. To this day, I completely thank NCWIT for who I am today.

When it came time to apply for colleges, I applied to mostly art schools, but then I made the abrupt decision to go to the University of Denver as a Computer Science major almost on a whim trying to avoid becoming another starving artist, but getting a full ride to the school did also help my decision significantly. From there I never looked back and am loving every moment of it.

Describe your role as a Software Engineer at Sendgrid. What do you work on?

I started as an intern at SendGrid in July 2017. During that time, I worked with the Go neural network the company uses for phishing prevention. If you know anything about machine learning, you know that building good datasets is the most time-consuming stage of building good supervised learning models. This is especially true with bad email identification, since spammers and phishers are constantly applying new strategies. Because of this, my intern project was to create an internal tool to build datasets used to train the classification model. I also added the last improvements to the neural network required to bring it into production.

In September, I started as a fulltime Fullstack Software Engineer and switched to the awesome Customer Growth Engineering team. Currently, I am a co-owner of the Signup process at SendGrid. We actually just recently deployed the app my coworker and I wrote. I work on most of the customer-facing services and internal customer support tools, both frontend and backend.

What is your day-to-day at Sengrid like?

My day-to-day at SendGrid is pretty different every day. I work in a pretty traditional AGILE development environment using Atlassian’s JIRA. I work directly on the signup, login, and billing flow along with internal customer support tools. The frontend work I do is done with NodeJS and React + Redux with small amounts of Ruby on Rails. The backend work I do is mostly Go and some Python, Perl, and Ruby. Our development environment mostly uses frameworks like Docker and build tools like Jenkins, BuildKite and Terraform. Since I am on one of SendGrid’s newest teams, most of the work I do is a green field: we get to build, break, and A/B test stuff, and I absolutely love it.

How would you describe Sendgrid’s work culture?

SendGrid’s work culture can most simply be explained by the 4H’s: Happy, Hungry, Honest, and Humble. I enjoy coming to work everyday and being motivated by passionate, friendly people. The company genuinely cares about its employees at every level and organization and manages to match employee's career goals and the company's goals. I’ve worked at places which only advertise great culture, but SendGrid really exemplifies what they preach. Everyday I feel genuinely fortunate to be working at this amazing place with such intelligent and caring people. This company has the best alignment I’ve encountered which spans across the entire organization. The company really motivates this great culture by hiring for culture fits, covering ordered lunch for us to eat together everyday, and having company-wide gatherings, like the yearly trip to Cabo, Mexico, called KAKO (short for Kick Ass Kick-Off event).

What are some challenges you encountered as a software engineer at Sendgrid? How do you overcome them?

As an early career software engineer, I feel like I encounter many challenges. At any company there is so much to learn and it is ‘drinking from the firehouse’ for a few months. In the beginning, this brought many new challenges for me. As I am a pretty independent learner, I really struggled to ask for help, and I had to learn how to get better at that quickly. I believe this issue stemmed from my feelings of insecurity from imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome was definitely the hardest problem I had to overcome, especially because I was so young an inexperienced in industry as this is my first fulltime job. I believe the best way I overcame this was time and learning. I really enjoy writing, so I try to write as much documentation as possible, so I can show myself I’ve accomplished something, it also makes it easier to show others that I’ve completed objectives, even though that was never questioned by others. I also got to know well my coworkers and members of the larger organization at all levels of command so that I understood my role better and how to help the company more.

If someone asked you "What was your crowning achievement at Sendgrid?", how would you reply?

My crowning achievement at SendGrid has increasing awareness in the larger community of the importance of diversity and inclusion at SendGrid. As a Latina, I advocate highly the importance of including more diversity in the tech industry. SendGrid has been given me the exposure and opportunities to become a representative for women and racial minorities in tech. I worked directly with SendGrid people operations to organize inclusion training and diversity and inclusion awareness weeks inside of the company as a planner of SendGrid’s diversity and inclusion initiative, called Prism. I also recently was the keynote speaker of the inaugural event for Denver’s chapter of ChickTech, where I spoke to underprivileged high school girls around Denver area. Last week, I was in California at SendGrid’s Redwood City offices representing SendGrid at their professional women in tech event partnered with PowerToFly. Next month, I am the SendGrid host for the Girl’s DevelopIt meetup at the SendGrid offices. I feel that I would not have had the majority of opportunities I have had to raise awareness and empower minorities in tech without SendGrid, and it is so rewarding. SendGrid has given me the opportunity to shine and facilitate my passion to improve the industry and change the status quo. However, not only has the company given me the opportunity to speak about empowering women, but also exemplify it. I have had the amazing opportunity to be take ownership of a service at SendGrid, writing the majority of the code for the signup process that thousands use everyday, which is such an honor, especially at my age, it is great to have people willing to give me the opportunity to show off my talent.

Out of all the email delivery companies within the industry, Sengrid seems to stand out the most with an outstanding 180,000+ customers (58,000 paying) sending over 35 billion emails per month! How would you pitch Sendgrid to those who are deciding it between its competitors such as Mailgun and Greenarrow? What about it makes it maintain its competitive edge?

SendGrid maintains its competitive edge because of its care for quality at every scale and aspect. SendGrid hires great people in order to make great products. They look for bar-raisers: people who are trying to get outside of the box and work beyond expectations. It maintains its competitive edge by its continuous innovation and amazing API. Its developer-friendly API attracts great developers to join the company. It also is a brand that helps the larger community and is aware that its customers are real people. Everyday SendGridders ask: how can we make this company and product better? And everyday SendGrid aims to stretch its reaches of customer base and product offerings while still maintaining great design.

Where do you see Sendgrid in 10 years and why?

In 10 years, I see SendGrid as an amazing company that has expanded its borders beyond being known for only email. I look at companies like Amazon, a company which no one thought of more than a book-selling store less than a decade ago. The company was able to spread its brand horizontally because of its care for quality at every step of the way in every aspect. Because of this, we now have AWS as a service we can use, etc. I think that SendGrid will be another brand to watch out for in terms of growing because of its care towards quality in product development, beating customer expectations, and exceptional hiring. There are many great plans for the future of the company that will help it skyrocket.

Any advice or suggestions for our non-technical readers who want to get involved with software engineering?

My advice to anyone who wants to get involved in software engineering is just do it! Technology is an amazing field because all of the resources you need are online and (mostly) free, you just have to do it! I started my journey in tech completely by continuously surfing the web and googling new concepts. For specific resources, I would recommend Khan Academy, Code Academy, W3 Schools, and Youtube videos. Youtube has so many different lectures available for completely free from amazing resources like Harvard, MIT, Mark Zuckerberg, Stanford, and Crash Course all for free. If you have the money, I would also recommend Coursera courses to learn anything. Just try not to get discouraged and know that the learning curve is really steep in the beginning, but it gets so much easier!

You can find Hannah on linkedin. If you want your startup to be interviewed, please reach out to me at contact@taehongmin.com. Thanks!