About the Translator

Sibylle Sehl is a Berlin-based Software Engineer.

Sibylle discovered Technology and Programming as more of a means to an end during her undergraduate degree. During a competition that centered on entrepreneurship, she discovered the fundamentals of Frontend Development, HTML and CSS, and how they allowed her to create things from scratch. Whilst still completing her business degree, she started studying in her own time and enrolled in a Programming Fundamentals Course. She was lucky enough to have the chance to intern in a few organizations that were either shaped by digital resources and a means of managing those or selling a digital product, allowing her to see work in Technology from the inside.

In 2016, she decided that Programming professionally was no longer a dream but something she wanted to pursue full-time and enrolled at The University of Edinburgh's MSc in Computer Science. This year was tough and very intense, especially since her peers had studied Computer Science beforehand. Fast forward to 2017 with a degree in the bag, she started working at Skyscanner as a Product Manager, where she first heard about React. While being a PM was insightful and incredibly rewarding, the lack of programming led her to reevaluate her career choice.

Studying in her free time and basically teaching herself JavaScript in the evenings, she started applying for Frontend Development jobs in Berlin, moving there in 2018. For her first job, she chose to work for a vibrant and young agency to get exposed to a variety of technologies and different projects. It was during this time, that she saw how incredibly useful and simple React made Frontend Development. Whilst still having to support vanilla JavaScript projects as well, she could see in many instances in which situations React was a great choice for a client and when it was possibly not. This love for React and its declarative approach to programming user interfaces also influenced her next career move, where she made working with React a hard requirement. She now works at ResearchGate as a Software Engineer continuing to use React and also learning PHP and GraphQL.