A brief story on rising up.

A project close to our hearts as an all female team, we jumped at the opportunity to create a site that all of us would benefit from in the real world. A site where all who identify as female could find a female mentor who has paved the way for us and who are actively looking for mentees - drastically reducing the time consuming job of finding other women who are in the position to take on a mentor in the tech world and eliminating the fear of reaching out to them.

We had an incredible amount of challenges during this project, we felt at one time it was becoming a comedy sketch, between our database leading us to debug like it was a murder mystery weekend, Github deciding to kick everyone off the project board, terminal errors that defy logic, multiple deployment issues, even our shared google sheets broke, all on top of the very basics of version control. We had life challenges too, a fevering child, a destructive and disruptive rescue dog, team member sickness, working and mothering on a weekend packed with a mother’s responsibilities - St Patrick’s day and Mother’s Day. But no matter what the team never wavered, we rose to each challenge, working together to come to solutions, continuously reviewing our progress in sprints, reordering and evaluating our MVP. We very rarely came across a merge conflict, there was constant communication and offers of support. Every single team member has tackled something they were not familiar with, learning to build with other team members logic, design and ways of working.

To say we have had a team full of powerhouses is an understatement. We are blessed with Roz’s incredible talent for design and commitment to join us straight off a plane, Joy’s experience with Django, documentation and testing, always pushing us and believing in us to take our knowledge and product one step further, Ivette’s tenacity, humour and courage to take on any challenge, Eleanor’s ability to multitask and the speed at which she is learning has us dumbfounded, Özlem pushing herself so far outside of her comfort zone and positively blooming in the process and Rachel is our amazing leader, team member and a fabulously, compassionate and fair woman keeping her eye on the bigger picture at all times.

We are immensely proud to work on a concept that aligned with a shared ethos, that we, as a grossly underrepresented gender must do all we can to raise each other up, to boost each others profiles, confidence and skills. And as we rise to always hold out our hands to those that are coming after us. To celebrate the wins of all those who identify as women in all fields, because in the battle of equality when one woman rises, so do we all.