‘She’rlocked Anonymous

My program was successful, but the determination to continue competing further eluded me. I longed for the hackathon to finish, staring at the minute hand on the clock as it inched closer to the hour. As soon as the buzzer sounded, I felt I had to escape to the one place calling out to me, my safe haven.

Add 5 cubic centimeters of Benedict’s reagent to the analyte. Reducing sugar's test. Gloves snapped around my wrists, a latex-like second skin. Instincts took over as I measured out chemicals in the test tube. Waiting for the reagents to change color, I felt like I was committing a crime. Here, in the Biology lab, I forgot about the monotony of code, finding joy, instead, in the bacterial cultures and magic probes that surrounded me. Why couldn’t I feel this way about CS? Somehow coding Python seemed venomous, and running Swift felt slow.

Bugs. Inhibitions. Fears. Amidst my peers experimenting on Arduino boards and developing websites and apps, I was frustrated that the answers to my problems didn’t lie in circuits or the code of an app that could help others. My mother had said the future would be written in code; my brother had emphasized IBM Watson’s would take over the world. Would I be left behind, for I didn’t possess...