NAT DUDLEY
Nat Dudley | Chief Design and Product Officer, Figure.NZ | Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland)
Girls and non-binary youth often find it hard to see a pathway for themselves into a coding career. How did you get into tech/coding? What is one piece of advice you have for them?
It can be so hard to find your way in. I was dissuaded from exploring technology at high school by a careers counsellor who pushed me towards medicine or business school. I tried them and absolutely hated it, and dropped out of university. I decided to get a job and do that until I found out what I enjoyed, which is solving complex problems relating to how humans and systems interact.
I took a job as a policy writer and accidentally ended up getting into service design. Then, entirely by chance, I met someone who encouraged me to get into tech and mentored me. They introduced me to people who worked in tech, and I became a UX designer and product person. I still didn’t believe I’d be able to code, though, even though I was secretly interested in it. It wasn’t until this year that I took time off work and did a coding bootcamp and realised I could do it and actually loved it!
Learning to code has been really beneficial to my design practice, but also it’s just really fun. I love the problem solving and the frustration and the satisfaction that comes from coding. Plus it can be really satisfying to control the creative process from end-to-end.
The key piece of advice I’d give is to figure out what you really enjoy, and find people and places that can help you learn and do more of that. Build strong relationships with people who can support you to achieve that, and don’t listen to people who tell you you can’t. Coding is hard work, and you’ll need a community around you who can support you and be your cheerleader and challenge you and push you to grow.
“Figure out what you really enjoy,
and find people and places that can help you learn”
Tell us about a rad piece of code that you’ve written? What piece of tech/code are you most proud of in your career so far?
I’m still a relative newbie to coding. I’m super proud of our bootcamp graduation project, Be Seasonable a small web app that helps you find what produce is in season in New Zealand and what the average cost is each month. Our team built the whole thing in a week and we learned such a lot in the process about progressive web applications.
Right now, I’m working on a project I’m excited about which is to help you when you’re having an anxiety attack. I haven’t deployed that yet, sorry! I’m most passionate about projects like this; small tools that solve a problem and are accessible to everyone and can make tiny but meaningful improvements in people’s lives.
There’s also so much more to our industry than just our code, so from a design and product perspective I’m really proud of Figure.NZ and the work we do to share data about New Zealand with everyone. But I think the piece of work I did that had the biggest impact was writing a guide for technology conference organisers to help them make their events more inclusive. It’s not really code, except that I made the very simple website. But it solved a real problem in a constructive way that helped people to do a better job, and I’m proud of that.
“I’m most passionate about … small tools that … can make tiny
but meaningful improvements
in people’s lives”
What big dreams do you have in your job? What are you aspiring to do next?
I wish I knew! I love Figure.NZ and our mission to help New Zealanders use data to thrive. But I’m also passionate about helping coders, designers, and product people work better together and would love to explore that. And I care a lot about building a more welcoming industry for people from traditionally underserved and underrepresented communities.
As a non-binary, disabled person in a senior role, I feel a responsibility to advocate for space in our industry for others and to be a visible example. The technology our industry builds has such a huge impact on the lives of other people; everything from visibility to harassment to accessibility to being able to access and use vital services in an affirming way. And yet our teams don’t reflect that. Our industry doesn’t reflect that. I want to keep pushing for that to change.
But at the same time, I’ve also discovered I love coding, and I’m really interested in where information security and user experience overlap. All of which is to say there are so many options and I’ll explore the right one when it comes along. I tend to do a little bit of a lot of things all at the same time, and follow my heart into work that fits what I care about.
Nat codes in JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and a wee bit of Ruby, very badly. Nat tweets @NatDudley.