About Me

Hi! My name is Cecy Correa, and I’m a software engineer with a decade of experience working (mostly) on backend systems.

I’m a big believer in having a growth mindset. I’m always looking to learn new things or tinker with things.

My background

My bachelor’s degree is actually in Film. I had a hard time deciding between Film and CS, and I chose film. Ultimately, I was part of a group called the ACTLab, which was a way to bridge technology and art. Through these classes, I learned web design and got my feet wet with programming anyway. I started by trying to build my own version of YouTube. Soon after, instead of making films, I started making websites for films, and the rest is history.

Fast-forward to the pandemic, I decided to use the time to learn something new, so I pursued a Master’s degree in Cybersecurity from UC Berkeley, as the program was remote-friendly. I chose cybersecurity at Berkeley because the program was interdisciplinary, so there was a lot of room for choosing what you wanted to learn.

I chose to harden some of my self-taught programming skills by taking programming fundamentals, where I was able to learn about data structures and algorithms more formally. I also learned cryptography, application security, and machine learning. Overall a great way to formalize your skills if you come from a non-CS background like I did.

I am very proud of the work I did as part of my Master’s degree, especially my capstone project, where my team and I created a board game to teach cybersecurity concepts to beginners. (We won an award!).

My career

I have mostly worked for late-stage startups, where I am used to wearing many hats. I feel this works great for me, because I can constantly learn new things.

ReturnPath / Context.IO

I worked at Context.IO, which was a startup within a startup. Context.IO was an API abstraction of email protocols, such as IMAP. The API allowed users to integrate with Gmail and Outlook inboxes, as well as generic IMAP providers, all through just one API. So our API simplified the process of building email integrations for our customers by just integrating with our API, instead of having to deal with the complexity of integrating with multiple email providers.

I learned all about telnet, and that some email providers take a very lose approach to implementing RFCs! But there’s always a way to work around it.

The stack was a polyglot stack of PHP, Node.js, Ruby on Rails, Golang, React, Angular, and Python.

Thinkful

Thinkful is an online learning platform that teaches software engineering, data science, and product management (among other topics). I was a software engineer working on the Growth Engineering team, mostly focused on top of funnel experiments or projects.

Working for Thinkful was an incredibly rewarding experience because the company had the noble mission of changing people’s lives. Our motto was “every day 1 life changed,” and that is something you can feel good about!

A Thinkful, I learned how to work cross-functionally with product managers, designers, and markerters. I even gave a talk on how we launched a brand new design system with heavy collaboration with design and marketing at VueConf 2020.

Shopify

Shopify was an amazing learning experience, where I got a taste of working for a large, more well-established company working on products at scale.

At Shopify, I worked on the App Extensibility team, working on the framework that allows third-party developers to build extensions on top of Shopify. A lot of the work I did was on the open source Shopify CLI, which is still publicly available on GitHub, although this CLI has since been deprecated.

A great part of working at Shopify was how free you would be to get involved in other initiatives. In addition to my role as an engineer, I worked with the R&D team to help onboard new engineers onto Shopify. This onboarding included giving presentations on how to ship at Shopify, answering questions, and serving as a mentor of sorts.

I also served as lead instructor of the Dev Degree program, where I taught Ruby on Rails and backend development to a new cohort of interns. This was a huge way for me to give back, and is possibly one of the most rewarding experiences of my career.

Netlify

I am currently a Software Engineer at Netlify, where I am back working on a late-stage startup in growth mode. I get to continue to wear many hats, move fast, and try new things.