Coder Spotlight: Marina Braverman

Marina Braverman on LinkedIn

A San Francisco Bay Engineer with an entrepreneurial spirit and a drive to solve problems, Marina Braverman is the founder of Braverman.IT, a company that specializes in setting up, maintaining, and troubleshooting WordPress sites. There she handles other people's “emergencies", explaining complicated options to her customers in a simple and straightforward manner that makes even the worst issues seem manageable.

Marina first started coding because she had a lot of ideas and wanted to implement them. Her formal education includes BA in Psychology with minors in Mathematics and Anthropology, showing the breadth of her education, and she has professional experience in providing technical support and system administration for a number of prestigious companies. She is also a member of Women Who Code which has provided her with support, inspiration, and important networking opportunities. She recounts the following story about one way that the organization has impacted her career.

“When I first arrived to the Bay Area a year ago, I barely knew anyone. WWCode gave me a ticket to API Days SF, a small but mighty conference where I learned about IoT and APIs, and heard talks that varied from general (how Jim Heising at IFTTT envisions IoT and APIs driving a global-scale cultural change) to very specific (just how do they jam the entire OS into 32KB of memory in a Pebble watch?). The opening and closing talks bracketed the conference well, reminding us just how many IoT devices now exist in the smart home and out of it, and how important it is to build in security and privacy protection from the ground up."

With Braverman.IT, Marina is able to take her skills, knowledge, and disciplined work ethic and use them to handle the wide variety of projects that her customers bring to her. She’s now learning more deeply about user needs and is expanding her career into user research and product management.

When asked what advice Marina would give to people looking to enter the tech industry she said, "Go to study groups and seek out peers when you're learning – it's lonely and frustrating when you first start out, whether it's right at the start or after you're through with Codecademy and wondering 'What's next?’ Also work hard to polish your communication skills, both writing and speaking. It’s your secret weapon and it will pay off.”