Meet athenahealth
Meet Michelle Alexander
Jyotsna Venkataramanan gave a lightning talk at our Spotify concert in January 2016. She is a Senior Engineer at Spotify. 
How (and when) did you get into your current field or company?
I’ve always been into taking things apart and figuring them out. My dad used to travel a lot and whenever he came back from an exotic location he would bring me a small gadget or tool that I would promptly take apart and figure out. As I got older I got more interested in using computers to solve complex problems. So I studied computer science at MIT and fell in love with programming and knew that’s what I wanted to do.
What does a typical day look like for you?
[The] first part of my day is mostly about checking in on systems or processes that I might have left running, catching up on email or doing a stand-up with my team to see what everyone else has been up to. For the rest of the day, I spend my time between writing Java code to maintain and create new features for our service and running jobs on huge amounts of data on Spotify’s Hadoop cluster.
What is the favorite part of your day?
Probably working with my coworkers, putting our heads together and talking through complex problems together.
What excites you about working in your industry?
There’s always new technologies and there is so much collaboration through online communities and meetups.
What is the best piece of advice you have been given?
Work hard, there’s really no alternative to hard work.
What is your favorite part of being a woman in STEM?
Despite what people say, there is a great camaraderie between women in STEM.
What other women inspire you?
Obviously Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer. But there are so many amazing women I look up to: Indra Nooyi and Robin Chase among them.
What is something that most people don’t know about you?
I grew up outside the US and didn’t move here till I was 18. I don’t have an accent so people don’t realize that.
What do you geek out about?
Databases, lots of data stored efficiently.
