Your Django Story: Meet Jessica McCay

This is a post in our Your Django Story series where we highlight awesome ladies who work with Django. Read more about it here.

 

Jessica McCay is a Lead Software Developer at Under Armour in Austin, TX. She worked for the run/ride tracking app, MapMyFitness, prior to the start-up being acquired by Under Armour in 2013. About a year ago, Under Armour bought two other successful apps in the health and fitness space, MyFitnessPal and Endomondo. Jessica leads a team of developers to create backend features and infrastructure that support the suite of Under Armour apps.

Jessica is also the mother of 2 year old twin girls.

How did your story with code start?

I took a programming class in high school where I had a very inspiring teacher. I participated in after school competitive programming events that he coached. We’d lug giant monitors, keyboards and cords onto the school bus and then into some other high school cafeteria and pair-program simple algorithms for speed and accuracy.

For some reason in college it never occurred to me to study computer science and I got a degree in philosophy.

Later, once I realized that I had no particular career path, I found this program at the University of Texas at Austin that would give me basic programming skills while paying me a salary. I learned a legacy programming language in addition to Python and Django.

 

What did you do before becoming a programmer?

I loved studying philosophy, but as a freshman I asked the professor, “What can i do with philosophy besides become a professor or lawyer?” and he said “You Can Think!” I love that because I do think thinking is a pretty useful skill and it also shows how little direction I had immediately after college. I did a little call center work and a little administrative assistant work for those first few years.

 

What do you love the most about coding?

I like problem solving. I like making order out of chaos and I like working with a team of smart and driven people. Coding can give you that little dopamine buzz when you get your tests passing or complete a project – that part can be fun too.

 

Why Django?

Django is the framework I know best and what the MapMyFitness app monolith is built in. We are decomposing this monolith in favor of microservices written in Java/Golang/Scala/Python over the course of the coming years, so I am not sure how much Django I have in my future besides patching old bugs.

 

What cool projects are you working on at the moment/planning on working on in the near future?

We are working to centralize a lot of foundational functionality between the Under Armour suite of apps including authentication and payment management. These changes should be invisible to users, but in the long term will have a great impact on a cohesive user experience as well as reducing repeated developer effort across apps. It’s been incredibly exciting to work with teams from Copenhagen to San Fransisco to guide this large vision into fruition.

 

What are you most proud of?

I’m proud when the team I work with feels unfettered and successful. Oh, and those baby girls

 

What are you curious about?

How did we get here? What is the point of all this?

 

What do you like doing in your free time? What’s your hobby?

I spend as much of my non-work time with my kids as I can. For “me” time, I workout a few times a week. While the kids sleep I’m usually focused on home-making in some sense– cooking, cleaning, and home improvements.

 

Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?

I think reading documentation is awesome and important, but I’ve gotten a lot of my knowledge from conversations and white-boarding. Be confident enough to admit when you don’t understand something and ask someone who does. Try to come into conversations explaining what you _do_ know and how you got there.

Secondly, don’t forget that there are lots of skill sets that are valuable to a business that aren’t just laying down lines of code. Planning, organizing, keeping up with details, communicating, and documenting are critical to almost every technical project that I have been part of.

 

Thank you so much, Jessica!

 

If you would like to suggest someone to be featured in the Your Django Story series (or would like to nominate yourself!), please email us at story@djangogirls.org!

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