If you’re reading this, it’s because I remembered to delete all the ‘testing, testing’ posts before launching my site.
Yay.
I’m Leanne, and I am many things – an avid reader, an author, a former teacher and academic, a mother, and currently a freelance software developer/engineer. I’ve spent the last year learning to be a data engineer after my life (happily) took a turn away from academia and universities, where I’d worked for many years as an English literature lecturer and scholar. My life was rooted in the humanities – in books, history, ideas…
And then I found myself installing Ubuntu on my trusty laptop and booting up VS Code, ready to join a different world entirely.
This could have caused a crisis of identity, but it didn’t. I almost typed the sentence I put down my books and started coding, but that isn’t true, because I never did put down the books. I simply started making things out of a different type of language: code. In autumn 2024, I began learning to code (Javascript and Python, initially). In March 2025, I decided to get serious about this and joined a Northcoders bootcamp in data engineering.
Around this time, the idea for Humanist Woman in Tech came to me. I’ve always been a writer in one way or another, both on paper and digitally. (I’m a millennial who remembers making my own websites and blogs with rudimentary html, before social media!) When I was an academic, I was always writing something. It occurred to me recently that I have no writing deadlines now, and that made me feel a little sad, and stuck. Writing is thinking. It is invention and possibility.
I made this blog as a place to document my ongoing journey between an academia and tech, across the (I believe) artificial divide between these two worlds, and as a place to articulate my thoughts about work and life. I hope to cover my projects, reactions to happenings in tech more widely, conversations with cool people I meet (hopefully), and words on other things from the perspective of one humanist woman in tech.
There will be book reviews. And guinea pigs.