Ten Years, One Blog Post
It's 2026 and I'm writing a blog post. On this blog. The one I haven't touched since 2015.
If you’re here because you remember carlyhasredhair from the Hackbright days — welcome back.
If you’re new — welcome.
It’s been ten years.
Here’s the short version:
I graduated from Hackbright Academy in September 2015. I joined Slack the next month.
I stayed for eight years. I shipped code, moved teams, grew up, burned out —and eventually left. I tried the startup thing. Then I stopped trying the startup thing. And then I took what I jokingly called a “creative sabbatical” — which turned out to be the most honest description of the most important year of my life.
Here’s the longer version. Or at least the beginning of it.
When I started this blog, I was a 25-year-old theater kid who had decided, somewhat recklessly, to teach herself how to code. The tagline was “journey of a girl who codes,” and I meant it literally. I was documenting the experiment in real time because I didn’t know if it would work. I didn’t know if I’d get a job. I didn’t know if I belonged.
I wrote because writing was how I navigated uncertainty.
And in some ways, it worked spectacularly.
I got hired at Slack before most people had heard of Slack. I built a career in software engineering from scratch. I went from not knowing what a for-loop was to becoming an engineer at one of the most culturally significant tech companies of the last decade.
That part of the story is real. And I’m proud of it.
But narratives flatten.
The “girl who codes” arc was inspiring because it was simple: outsider learns to code, gets dream job, changes her life.
That’s true.
It’s also incomplete.
The years that followed were more complicated than any blog post could hold. There were things I saw inside the tech industry that I’m still processing. There were costs to “making it” that no one warns you about. There were years when I was so deep inside the machinery of a company that I couldn’t see the shape of the thing I was inside.
I can see it now.
I left Slack in May 2024.
The specifics aren’t the point — at least not today.
What matters is that leaving created space.
Space to think.
Space to feel.
Space to reconnect with the parts of myself I’d packed away when I pivoted from the arts to engineering.
Before I was an engineer, I studied Radio/Television/Film, Theater, and Political Science at Northwestern. At the time, it felt excessive. Looking back, those disciplines were circling the same question:
How do stories shape power?
And how does power shape stories?
I just didn’t have the life experience to answer it yet.
Now I do.
Over the last year and a half, I’ve had long, searching conversations with women across the tech industry — founders, investors, executives, operators.
We’ve talked about power.
About invisible rules.
About real costs.
About what happens behind closed doors when a woman becomes inconvenient.
Those conversations have changed me.
They’ve made me angrier. They’ve made me clearer. They’ve pointed me toward a creative project I’m not ready to share in full — but that I’m building with everything I have.
I changed the tagline of this blog.
It used to be “journey of a girl who codes.”
Now it’s “journey of a girl who forges her own path.”
The coding was never really the point.
The point was that I was willing to start over when the old path stopped making sense.
I did it at 25 when I left the arts for tech.
I’m doing it again at 35 — this time with a decade of insider knowledge, a network of extraordinary women, and a much sharper understanding of what’s at stake.
I’m going to be writing here more regularly.
About tech — from the perspective of someone who’s been inside it and stepped back far enough to see its shape.
About creativity — and what happens when you finally give yourself permission to pursue the thing you’ve been postponing.
About reinvention — the real kind, without a playbook.
About building in an era where AI is reshaping everything — and what that means for the people living inside the systems we create.
I don’t have all the answers.
But I know how to write my way through uncertainty.
And I know there are people — especially women navigating tech, leaving it, or circling back to something they set aside — who might want to come along.
So.
I’m Carly.
I have red hair.
I’ve been gone for a while.
And I’m building something that matters.
More soon.
Welcome back, I look forward to reading more about your path, Carly!