AURYNN SHAW

Aurynn Shaw | Entrepreneur at Eiara.nz | Wellington

Girls and non-binary children often find it hard to see a pathway for themselves into a coding career. How did you get into coding? What is one piece of advice you have for them?

It is hard to see a path into coding! There’s lots of barriers that don’t need to be there, and tearing those barriers down is important to me. My story of getting into coding is one that comes with a lot of privilege. My dad wrote software for a living, so I had access to computers and the internet from a very young age, and I was exposed to the possibilities that programming could offer. 

What got me into coding was wanting to make video games. This partly manifested in learning to write software, but mostly manifested in wanting to be an artist. At the time, the most appealing artists for game development were technical artists, the ones who could both do the art and write software – plugins for the modelling packages, game logic, and stuff like that. This led me to find a couple of contracts writing web software with cgi-bin (oh, those were the days), which really spurred and developed my interest in writing software.

“[Find] a small community of people
to write code with … Make this space for you 
and do cool things together. Lift each other up. ”

What kept me in, and what I’d really offer as my advice, is finding a small community of people to write code with. I found some online friends (there were maybe eight of us total) that were all into writing software and developing our skills. Even if we were working in different languages and on different projects, we were mutually supportive and mutually talking about the cool things we were learning and discovering. We didn’t have to perform expertise for each other, and we felt safe to share when we were ignorant about something or needed help. 

Keeping this community small is, I’d say, a key component as well. Too big and it gets overwhelming, too small and there’s not enough mutual support and the group won’t feel that great. Find people for this group that you like and want to be around. You don’t have to tolerate anyone who makes you feel bad here; too often in the broader world we do have to make those sacrifices. Make this space for you and do cool things together. Lift each other up. 

Tell us about a rad piece of code that you’ve written? What piece of code are you most proud of in your career so far?

Oh gosh, rad pieces of software? I think the most important piece of software I wrote, in terms of learning to write software, was my own programming language. It was terrible, it was slow, it was a really bad idea, but it taught me so much about how software actually works from a computer’s point of view. It felt super rad to write it.

More recently, much of what I do are “terrible hacks that are also amazing.” I wrote an impressive Terraform module that packages up a Python project for use with AWS Lambda, which is both extremely cool and probably not the best use of Terraform. The best projects seem to end up like that. Here’s the project: https://github.com/Eiara/terraform_lambda_zip.

I’m most proud of a project where I wrote a clean, minimalist wrapper interface library for RabbitMQ. It made it super easy for everyone else on my team to work with Rabbit (which is notoriously difficult), and was the library that enabled my co-workers to build some amazing things. I’m also quite proud of the above Terraform module, as it makes deploying complex AWS Lambda programs much easier for people who may not know how to correctly package a Python project for that environment.

I’m also proud of my early contributions in the NodeJS community in 2010, when I worked on one of the Postgres drivers. It was extremely amazing to learn about the actual on-the-wire network protocol, and add a significant featureset to that early driver. Sadly, I moved to New Zealand after that, and never had time for it again.

“I build tools that make it easier and faster
for people who do ship software … I make it possible
where there was difficulty and stress before”

So much of what’s rad for me nowadays is how much I can and do enable. I don’t often write user-facing software, I build tools that make it easier and faster for people who do ship software. I make it safer for people who don’t know much about web security to build applications. I make it possible where there was difficulty and stress before.

I spent lockdown building the infracode (Terraform, Shell script, a couple of other languages in there as well) to launch Cloud Island, a Mastodon-powered social network hosted entirely in New Zealand. This is so rad for me because it taught me and gave me the tools to build cloud resources entirely in New Zealand, and on the Catalyst Cloud instead of AWS, Azure or Google Cloud. This was a huge deal because it smoothes the path for people who want to host in New Zealand, and who need to keep their data and their software in New Zealand. It enables because it creates a social network space away from Twitter, one that has strong and caring moderation from day one, one that wants to be a place where we don’t have to perform for the world stage.

What big dreams do you have as a coder? What are you aspiring to do next?

Honestly, my big dreams have in many was shifted from the code I’m going to write to what and who I’m going to enable next. For instance, right now Cloud Island charges money and this is exclusionary for people who can’t afford that. But the reason I charge money is so I can build up to being able to afford to pay for moderators, community managers and developers – people who benefit the community directly and benefit the fediverse as a whole. But I still I want to be able to provide a way for people who can’t afford that fee to join and participate and have this community too, so they can benefit from these things directly. That’s a major goal for who I enable next.

Cloud Island also gave me the tools to launch new Mastodon instances in New Zealand and to understand how to run those instances. This means that I can enable new communities to have private social networks, or join the fediverse under their own terms, with their own moderation and their own data hosting choices. I think this could be a huge enabler for iwi, Pasifika or other marginalised groups to build those social spaces with their own goals, without being forced into what a US corporation thinks that social networking should look like. Without being advertised to.

If I end up joining a company again I aspire to being a CTO, with the responsibility of enabling the teams that I lead, making easier entry points for women and non-binary people to join the industry, and making those teams safe for them. The pipeline into tech is only a small part of the problem with marginalised people entering, and so much more is that it can be so toxic to stay, so hard to want to stay.

“The pipeline into tech is only a small part
of the problem with marginalised people … it can be so toxic to stay, so hard to want to stay.”

I aspire to doing more mentorship and sharing the broad swathe of skills and knowledge and horrible mistakes that I’ve made, and to give opportunities and be the role model that I wish I’d had more of. As a transgender woman, when I was learning to code and initially joining the industry, there weren’t a lot of women I could look up to. Lynn Conway had only just started to come out and Dani Bunten had already tragically passed away. The online communities that I was a part of had a lot of trans women my own age, and a couple of older women as well, and while they gave me some confidence there was also a lot of fear. Being trans in the early 2000s still had a lot of stigma and “you must be stealth to survive” in the transition narratives. It took until 2013 before I was able to come out (in large part thanks to the example set by Megan).

So I aspire to being that brilliant light in the dark that shows you can be successful and weird and loud and bombastic and that’s okay and accepted. I aspire to making more space, to building new bridges, to burning out the toxicity with the fire in my veins.

In the less grandiose dreams I’m also working on a new book of photography, and writing the tools to do autoscaling groups on the Catalyst Cloud. Sounds a lot less dramatic, doesn’t it? 

Aurynn codes in: Python, Ruby, Shell, and Terraform on a day-to-day basis, but is also familiar with Java, C# and SQL. She is most excited about learning Rust.