About Me

View from Pao de Açucar, in Rio de Janeiro

I’ve spent most of my life working with the written word. After getting my degree in Slavic Languages and Literatures from UC Berkeley, I went on to become a professional editor and writer, often living and working abroad. As a freelancer, I’ve worked on more than 100 nonfiction books, many of them written by and about women. I’ve also worked as a guidebook author for Lonely Planet (under my maiden name), specializing in the former Soviet Union.

In 2013, while researching for a novel about a female programmer, I took a Coursera MOOC on Python. It was then that I realized I’d missed my calling: Coding has everything I love about editing (structure, analysis, language, logic, parsing, debugging, refactoring) but is more intellectually stimulating. I immediately shifted focus and became fully devoted to learning everything I can about software development. In 2014, I was happily accepted into Hackbright Academy, a ten-week full-stack software engineering fellowship for women.

My first job out of Hackbright was as a Growth engineer at SurveyMonkey, where I worked for a year and a half. I then joined Credit Karma, where my major contributions were to projects that included building company’s in-house experimentation platform, launching a new Mortgage vertical, and internationalizing the core product for the launch of the UK version of Credit Karma. In January 2021, I joined Reforge.com, an incredibly fast-growing and exciting career-education platform led and taught by some of the top leaders in the tech space.

Github: doubledherin

LinkedIn: /in/wendydherin