New to the team: Developer Evangelist Floor

We’re happy to welcome Floor to the team. She’ll be the go-to person for all your questions regarding CheckiO and she’ll manage our Twitter account and Facebook page.

Floor exchanged Rotterdam for Vienna about 2 years ago and is currently planning to move to Berlin. Whenever she’s not hanging around in the CheckiO forum, she’s involved in organizing and coaching at Rails Girls events, the Ruby User Group in Vienna, PyLadies Vienna or virtually anything that helps beginners get into the wonderful world of programming.

Why did you decide to work at CheckiO?
Funny story. I used to do some tech reporting for a startup platform the first few months of 2013. I came across CheckiO as one of the few companies at TechStars Boston that originally came from outside the US. Back then I interviewed Liza about their experiences with TechStars and she made sure I’d get in touch with Alex. We never really stopped writing funny emails back and forth and Alex showed great timing when he mentioned CheckiO was looking for a developer evangelist. I was looking for a new opportunity that would get me closer to online learning, gamified and all. That I’ll get to better my knowledge of Python at CheckiO, is a big plus!

What do you do when you’re not… ‘evangelizing’?
I love keeping up-to-date when it comes to online education, OSS, I enjoy going to conferences and marathon-like sessions of watching tv-series.

When did you start learning programming and why?
I started learning programming August last year as I wanted to learn something new and because I… wanted to fix bugs! My then co-workers had coached at several Rails Girls workshops (beginner workshops to Ruby on Rails) and it sounded like so much fun, I started to go through the Rails Girls guides and planned a workshop to take place in the Netherlands. In 6 months. To put a little pressure on this learning thing. Turned out that really helped me pulling though. That, and the help I got from co-workers and developer friends. I could even call myself a junior developer at that company for one day a week. Which was exciting and it definitely pushed me forward.

What’s good (or: elegant) code to you?
Coming from the Ruby world, there are a lot of assumptions what good code should look like. It should be DRY, test driven and object oriented. Rubberducking, refactoring and pair programming are vital parts of a Ruby developer’s life and vocabulary. I’d say starting in the Ruby world made me very conscious of good web development practices and ever looking to improve my skills and code.

If you'd be a character in a game, who would you be?
I’m addicted to Jurassic Park Builder, so if I were to choose what character I’d be in a game, I’d opt for dinosaur keeper!

What would you change if you could be CheckiO’s CEO for a day?
I’d change everything to Ruby! Haha, no. I’d probably have everyone play a bunch of games and learn from them - how do they work, why do you get hooked, how can we translate that to coding challenges?

You can follow Floor on Twitter and on CheckiO!

Thinking of joining our crazy team? We’re looking for Python developers and UX/UI engineers!