About Carly Has Red Hair
I started Carly Has Red Hair almost ten years ago while teaching myself how to code.
I wrote about confusion, ambition, and small breakthroughs. My last post was on the first day of an all-women’s coding bootcamp. It later became required reading for new Hackbright Academy cohorts. Years after that, strangers would recognize me at conferences and corporate events as “Carly Has Red Hair.”
Why did I stop writing?
I’ve asked myself that often.
For a while, I felt like I owed the internet an explanation.
But the truth is: I was building.
For nearly a decade, I helped build products used by millions as an early engineer at Slack. I learned how ideas become infrastructure. How systems scale. How narratives shape outcomes.
Eventually, I stepped away.
What followed was a deliberate season of reflection — a creative sabbatical. A recalibration. A return to first principles.
This is the next chapter.
What This Is Now
This publication lives at the intersection of:
Engineering and AI
Storytelling and narrative structure
Systems thinking
Reinvention
I write about building — software, stories, companies, and new chapters.
Some posts explore AI beyond the hype cycle.
Some examine narrative as a form of infrastructure.
Some document second acts while they’re still unfolding.
This isn’t commentary from the sidelines.
It’s thinking in public while building in real time.
Why the Name Stayed
Carly Has Red Hair already existed in the world. It had history. It had momentum. It had people who remembered it.
So I reclaimed it.
The years I didn’t document aren’t missing — they’re embedded. The future posts will fill in the gaps, not as a timeline, but as insight.
If you’re here, you’re early again.
Why subscribe?
Because the most interesting work is visible before it’s obvious.
If you’d rather see ideas while they’re forming — and watch something take shape in real time — you’ll feel at home here.
About Carly
Carly Robinson is a Northwestern-trained actress, engineer, and writer.
She studied Theatre and Political Science at Northwestern University before teaching herself to code and moving into tech.
She was an early engineer at Slack, where she helped build products used by millions and was awarded multiple software patents for her work. After nearly a decade in tech, she stepped away to expand her definition of building — to include story, narrative design, and creative media.
Today, she works at the intersection of technology and storytelling — developing original film and television projects, exploring AI’s impact on craft, and documenting builders in real time.
She’s currently exploring conversations with founders and engineers building in the AI era — focusing on craft, resilience, and the human side of innovation.
She’s particularly interested in how people navigate second acts — and how the tools we build shape the stories we tell.
