Ask HN: Female hacker-founder AMA

151 points

12 years ago

Tired of all the gender banter lately? Me too. Especially when every press outlet says we (female tech founders) are as rare as a mythical creature. So how about getting them answers straight from the source (female tech founders). If you belong to this group do a quick intro about yourself before answering questions. If you don't and want to learn more about the HN female tech entrepreneurs, feel free to ask as a reply.

My turn:

Name: Diana

Startup: http://DoerHub.com (dogfooding: http://www.doerhub.com/for/doerhub )

Role: Founder, wrote every non-open-source line of code (Rails, JS, D3, Neo4j, Node.js, MongoDB) on the site in a grad school dorm room.

In tech since: 1998 (Age 13). Haven't stopped since.

How did you start?: Started in rural Bulgaria and parents couldn't afford a computer so I volunteered at internet cafes to learn HTML and JS online after hours, then did graphics in flash, then Action Script, evolved to writing data mashups, custom JS libraries, rich visualizations for CNN during elections, CMS front-end architecture, full-stack web products from there.

Why did I start: had a pen-pal girl from Sweden who was a year older than me and had built her own website. Once I realized I can learn for free and the world could see my work I was addicted (lived in a censored country for a while so that mattered).

Proof of cred: http://www.linkedin.com/in/dianazink and http://i.cdn.turner.com/cnn/.element/js/3.0/search/SearchProcessor.js and http://i.cdn.turner.com/cnn/.element/js/3.0/search/customSrchProcessor.js used by CNN, NBA, and some other sites.

Has your gender made any of this hard?: I'm not muscular, so building online stuff is actually easier on me than the "reputable" jobs my grandfather said I should do instead.

Ask away.