Profile

The Name

vonByte? What’s that? To be honest: It’s nothing. It is based on a nickname given to me by former work colleagues: “Miss von Byte“ or “Tanja von Byte”. ”Von” is a german nobiliary particle like “of” or “de” and “Byte”.. well, what should a say… The expression was the friendly paraphrase of “totally enthusiastic computer scientist” in short: “female nerd”.

But the nickname finally became sort of my own brand, for the sake of simplicity mostly without “Miss” or the first name. In addition, it’s almost always available as a username for account registrations (except for Twitter: there is actually a vonbyte-Account, but it has expired). In the meantime, I can not even imagine a virtual identity as “non-vonByte”.

The Person

What should I tell you about me? The basics: I’am a classic 80s geek, growing up with my Commodore 64 and learning my first lines of code with the ultra-modern languages “Pascal” and “Basic”. When I got my first PC in the early 90s, I switched from programming to understanding operating systems and hardware. Over the years I discovered scripting and found out that you can improve programms by self-developed extensions. And then I discoverd the internet… and HTML and CSS (we throw a big veil of silence over my first so-called websites).

However: professionally I was pretty sure that I will never succeed in the it/dev-wworld (and yeah… it wasn’t really commonfor a girl in that time to go that way, so the support wasn’t the biggest). So instead of studing “IT” at the university, I studied a number of humanities and got my master degree in history, linguistics and literary studies. To be honest I loved studying, but have never worked in this area until today. In order not to be unemployed while looking for my future “real” job, I took a temporary one and ended up with a PC, web applications, automation and an IT infrastructure … Long story short: I got an additional degree as computer scientist and worked as a developer, team leader, senior web developer, project manager and Head of IT since.

Why do I love my Job? Code doesn’t know the word “limit”. There is a solution to every problem. Ok: to ALMOST every problem. This is very soothing and one can concentrate on the “how” and not on the “if”. And I find it still fascinating that simple combinations of “on” and “off” can lead to things like scripts, programs, games and websites.

Why pink?

I’m living in Switzerland and have very little personal experience with gender discrimination in IT. But especially in th times when I was responsible for the IT infrastructure, networks and servers, I had to deal with a couple of external service providers or suppliers whose first sentence was “Please let me speak to your boss”. Always took me some to convince them that I AM the boss (regarding these matters). A few times I worked with clients who first had to gain trust after hearing that I’m not only a programmer or administrative project manager, but also the technical leader.

So with tongue-in-cheek I thought: If people a girly girl, they get one, and made pink my preferred color (it's not even my favorite color in real life). Pink file folders were bought, as well as pens and pencils or plastic wallets and other work materials. An of course my IDE-Theme turned pink (as a dark mode fan since ever it surely has a brillant contrast…). But the nicest thing is that many of my male colleagues begann to pink into their everyday work as a symbol of equality: from the IDE theme over color configuration of their online tools to using pink covers for their notebooks and smartphones.

Im no radical feminist, but I believe in equality. This means everyone should have the same rights and duties, regardless of skin color, gender or any other disposition. I have learned to live with stereotypical points of view and I also know that I myself (unconsciously) am not free from prejudices. So I smile and convince by work and have no problem with that at all. But sometimes even my favorite techs and brands make me smile a bit. Take a look at the first shirts in the new official Laravel Store ;-)

Source: https://gumroad.com/laravel (as of 2020-06-22)