Raddi Samardjieva Hansen

Get to know Raddi Samardjieva Hansen

What are you looking for in your next role?

I am looking for a role which would allow me to learn and grow with the support of a great team, and ideally in a company involved in the creation of an innovative product that aims to help or change people's lives in a meaningful, positive way.

Why did you decide to change career and/or educational paths? What was your prior path and how did you end up down that road initially?

The main reason has been my desire to find more meaning and pride through my work. I enjoy problem-solving and I have admired innovation and the tech industry for a long time. My Journalism and Mass Communications major in college exposed me to some work with computers, where I acquired experience, but mostly in graphic design. I did spend countless hours on the side as a part of a number of online communities, and I used to teach myself basics in web design using HTML and the first versions of CSS. Software-engineering was not an available option for me at the time. I am a part of the generation that came of age at the same time as the Internet was coming onto the scene, and I have been fascinated with it from the very beginning. The tech industry kept steadily changing and became a more intrinsic part of everyday life, and I in parallel I grew even more curious and drawn toward the field. As a first-generation immigrant, my path in life turned out to be unpredictable at times and somewhat winding, but my desire to become a software-engineer has always stayed on front roll for me. This led me to pursue a Graduate Certificate in Web Technologies at Harvard Extension School, which I successfully completed in 2019. It was a great and solid entry into the foundations of a number of important web languages and technologies. Subsequently, I found Launch Academy, and after some research and inquiring, I realized that it would be a perfect fit and the right next step for me.

Where have you been involved in the tech community (events attended, volunteer activities, etc.)?

I have an immense desire to get more involved in the tech community and attend future events of interest to me. I do subscribe to Women Who Code and Girl Develop It meetup groups for Boston. I have successfully pitched a couple of separate smaller scale projects in tech in the past, which I ended up getting and completing. Despite the scale, I am very proud of them, and have learned a lot through them. I acquired the help of a mentor for the first project, which was a re-design and migration of a membership yacht club website on Cape Cod; the second project I was involved in was a web application for a non-profit organization, which I worked on together with a more senior software-engineer. He happened to also be a personal contact of mine, whom I managed to recruit and take on the project with me. Through his guidance and lead, we were able to build a functioning application from scratch, which today serves the communities of Cape Cod and The Islands, and I learned invaluable lessons about the web development process.

What has been the most fulfilling aspect of your journey towards becoming a web developer? What's been your biggest challenge and how have you overcome it?

A big challenge for me has been figuring out the right path towards changing my career and taking the proper educational steps. Consequently, it has also been the most fulfilling, because I feel that I have made the right choices so far and persevered through some uncertainty and personal setbacks. In terms of technical challenges, developing a clear understanding of having the monolith of different technologies coalesce in their inner workings together has been one of the bigger challenges. Working to train my thought process in how to solve more complex logic has also been a challenge that I continue to improve on on a daily basis.

If you had an unlimited budget and resources, what would you build?

With unlimited budget and resources, I would want to build a technology that would allow one to upload their individual genome sequence information onto an application. In response and based on that information, the application would be able to "spit out" a detailed analysis for optimizing that human's life cycle together with a complete guide to next steps on how to improve further, as well as information on specific cures (if necessary). I would like to make the process accessible and available to everyone.