Meet Claire: A Spanish Teacher Turned Software Engineer

Life has convinced us numerous times that our education does not have to strictly determine our career path. And that the skills we gather along the way can take us somewhere we have never dreamed of. Meet Claire Muller, software engineer at Re:amaze who is a perfect example of that.

Claire’s educational background has nothing to do with software engineering. But her degrees in International Studies and Spanish Language and Literature, along with her work experience in teaching and customer service, gave Claire a diverse and extremely valuable set of skills.

Let’s see what this multitalented .MEr is all about.

Passion For Learning: How Claire Became A Software Engineer

As she says about herself, Claire is a “fast learner who is passionate about finding efficient solutions to hard problems.” And despite the seeming genericness of this statement, in Claire’s case this has been empirically proven.

Attending Flatiron School in Seattle was truly a turning point in her life. There, she got the opportunity to work on five projects and master coding through both group and solo work. Thus, she sharpened her coding skills and learned to think like a programmer.

And what did all of this mean for Claire? A big change in her life. A fresh start of a new career in coding. An opportunity to broaden her skillset and widen her mindset.

Moving forward. As a Customer Success Engineer, she worked on building an internal support app in Golang with an integrated Slack app to pull information from all support channels for easier prioritization of customer inquiries. In addition, Claire monitored all support channels for customer questions, assisting or routing as needed.

When it comes to programming Claire Muller is proficient in Golang, JavaScript, React, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, HTML, CSS/Sass, Git, SQL, PostgreSQL and Linux (Ubuntu). She currently works for Re:amaze – an integrated customer service and helpdesk platform, recently acquired by the GoDaddy brand.

A Software Engineer Beyond Stereotypes

Who do you picture when you think of a software engineer? The image of a developer as some antisocial bearded genius in a dark room. Coding and playing computer games. That’s probably the first thing that comes to your mind, right? Now, sometimes, this is the case. But Claire is among those trailblazers who will usher in a new era of what a typical software engineer looks like.

The underrepresentation of women in tech is undeniable. A lot of companies still encourage many stereotypes concerning developers, and those who don’t fit these stereotypes are still left out

And it is clear that more innovations come from a diverse team where members can bring new perspectives and challenge one another. Additionally, it can put unseen pressure on you if you are the only woman in a leadership position.

So, how can we change that and be more inclusive? Why do we need to break these stereotypes?

First things first, we need to ensure young girls have strong role models of other successful women in IT. And this is exactly what Claire is doing with the AllTogether app.

What is AllTogether?

You know that situation when you feel helpless because you’ve lost some item at home and you cannot find it? Would you like to have an application that will help you track your stuff? Well, Clair worked on a project exactly like that!

It’s an inventory app called AllTogether that helps users keep track of their belongings at their homes and find them easily. Thanks to Claire, this app is now available to all of us who are prone to losing things all the time. The application was built using React, Ruby on Rails, and Google OAuth.

As for other projects that Claire participated in, there’s POC Slack bot that allows a user to create GitHub issues using a slash command. Then there’s the Minesweeper clone (with a live updating score) and Jeoparody (an app recreating the popular game show, Jeopardy). These are just some of the apps she developed working on individual and partner projects.

With a portfolio like that, Claire is a perfect role model for girls who are considering coding but are not convinced about joining this industry due to gender inequality.

Giving Back To The Community

Claire Muller is very active digitally, gladly interacting with her online community. She regularly publishes blog posts and eagerly replies to readers’ comments. Skills she developed as a teacher have allowed her to do something more, like: build relationships with students, inspire them to learn and resolve problems through developing applications that facilitate people’s common issues.

Claire also shares her knowledge and experience with younger developers.

In her posts, she helps the beginners (junior DEVs) by motivating them to work on small projects. At the same time, this also helps her keep her own skills sharp. For example, one of her posts called “What Should I Make Next? Quick Project Ideas” provides a list of simple but functional sites for practicing. Among others, these include coding a food delivery site, a site that changes colors based on the weather, a site for saving and displaying articles, and a counter that logs how many glasses of water you drank that day.

Claire truly went out of her way. She shares her job-searching and online-presence-building experience with the people who are in the same position as she once was.

Speaking of online presence building, let’s check out how Claire’s online presence looks like.

Claire’s Online Presence

Now this is what Claire’s personal website (clairemuller.me) looks like.

Starting with the homepage. It’s split up in two halves. The left half is taken up by Claire’s picture (just in case we don’t fail to recognize her when we run into her somewhere). And the other half is neat and minimalistic, allowing us to check out her work, connect with her, and just find out more about her.

All in all, Claire’s website is yet another .MEr website showing the world what the person behind the website is capable of.

Prospective Plans

Claire is helping people perfect their online presence by selflessly sharing her advice. but what does the future hold for her?

Well, she plans to expand the list of her accomplishments, learn new skills, and master new computer languages, frameworks and tools. Only through self-improvement can we truly help others around us, and Claire is striving to do just that.

We wish you luck on your ventures, Claire!