Community is part of the work

I often describe myself as a self-taught developer, but that phrase only tells part of the story. I learned outside a traditional computer science path, but I did not learn alone. Communities such as FreeCodeCamp, Codebar, and Women Who Code gave me structure, encouragement, and access to people willing to share what they knew.

At Codebar and Women Who Code events, senior engineers would sit beside junior developers and help us work through the blockers in our code. Their time and patience made an unfamiliar industry feel more accessible. Those experiences taught me that technical growth is rarely just an individual exercise: it also depends on having people around you who make it safe to ask questions and keep going.

Moving to Tokyo deepened that lesson. Working with an international team at Flagship showed me how much good engineering depends on communication, attention to detail, and collaboration. Later, becoming more involved with Women Who Code Tokyo led me to SpeakHer, a bilingual open-source directory of women speakers in Japan. I had spent a long time feeling intimidated by open source; contributing became possible when a community connected me to a meaningful project and maintainers who were prepared to mentor newcomers.

As I became more experienced in Shopify, community continued to shape my work. Groups such as ShopDev Alliance and conversations with other agency owners in Ecommerce Agency Growth (EAG) helped me understand the platform and the business around it. Attending Shopify Editions.dev in Toronto made that ecosystem tangible: developers, agencies, product teams, and partners openly sharing what they had learned and built.

Over time, my role in communities changed. I moved from attending events and asking for help to organizing, speaking, mentoring, and contributing to Women in Software Engineering Japan. That shift also changed how I think about recognition. Making work visible is not simply self-promotion; it is a way to communicate impact, acknowledge the people behind it, and create space for others to be seen.

Looking back, community has not been separate from my career. It helped me enter technology, find my place in Shopify, contribute to projects I cared about, and grow into leadership. It remains one of the ways I learn, stay connected, and try to return some of the support that made my own path possible.