Cynthia is a Customer Solutions Architect at Heroku. Her first coding happened on an Apple IIe computer her parents bought when she was ten years old, and even before that she was playing Oregon Trail on the PET 32 computers at her elementary school. By age 12, she decided she wanted to either be a rocket scientist or write computer games. She was lucky enough to have parents who never bothered to tell her that girls didn’t do that sort of thing, and eventually got a Computer Science degree from Northwestern University. There she was very active in the Society of Women Engineers and is pretty sure there was at least one other woman in her CS graduating class. She traded the dream of video games for 3D computer graphics and has worked at Pixar, Nvidia, and IDEO.