I’ve been writing blog posts and journal entries for about fifteen years. To put that into perspective, that’s half of my life.

Having archived or deleted all of my angst riddled teenage posts as well as those from my early (existential crisis) twenties, I decided it was time to start again. I’ve been writing professionally for about five years, companies now pay me to write blog posts. There’s a nice example of a post I wrote for Mudita in my previous Medium post ‘How to be More Human’.

I was always very good at writing.

The voice in my head always seemed far more eloquent than the one coming out of my mouth. Now, this post is about technology, so why am I writing about or perhaps more accurately, typing, about writing?

My dad worked in the instrumentation and control engineering (ICE) industry and it’s likely I got my ability to write from him. Not only is he a brilliant storyteller but he also let me use his computer!

The first program I used to type something longer than a couple of sentences was Word 95. Luckily for me, my dad’s computer was always updated (Word 97, Word 98, Word 2000). I wrote about Mars and submitted it as part of a school science project.

I imagine I used a physical encyclopedia to get my information as Google wasn’t the search engine it is today. People used to prefer Ask Jeeves. If you’d like to know what Google looked like in 1998, there’s a simulator here.

I moved around a lot as a child. I once emailed my new school and unbeknownst to me, the teacher read that email out loud to my new classmates, which didn’t go down very well when I arrived a couple of weeks later. Suffice it to say, emailing your school about how excited you are to join it means you’ll get bullied by children who’ve never used a computer before (it was the early 2000s).

By the time I was twelve years old, I had my own computer.

I did a corporate engineering internship at sixteen.

A lot of people I’ve met started their coding journey with Myspace. A bit of basic HTML and CSS here and there until you get good enough to alter your friend’s profiles. I remember familiarising myself with the Samy worm and spending hours trying to get ‘more followers’.

A note to my younger self: Even if you’re innocently trying to improve the design of a profile, please don’t alter other people’s files without their permission. It turns out they really don’t appreciate it.

The internet helped me grow up, admittedly a little faster than I would’ve liked. If you’re a parent, make sure you know exactly who your child speaks to online and where they are at all times. I could bypass any parental controls before I was thirteen and it’s more common than most parents think.

I studied systems at school and when I was fifteen, I left. That same summer my dad helped me get an internship where I would work on databases and demos for a large corporation. It was after this internship that I decided not to continue working with technology and instead, I decided to reject it.

I began studying art and design, then I left home.

Being a teenager was difficult for me, I never fit in and I sought solace online. I also really enjoyed The IT Crowd (a British TV show), standard nerd.

Without my parents providing me with a stable internet connection, I would exclusively use the wireless connections of my new neighbours to get online. In truth, I didn’t pay to use the internet for several years.

That’s when I first started to understand that human error was largely to blame for data breaches, vulnerabilities in software and various other security issues.

I’ll use this opportunity to give you some advice about passwords:

Passwords should be at least eight characters long.

Please try not to recycle old passwords.

Don’t use word or number combinations which are easy to guess.

Don’t use only letters or numbers in your passwords.

Use both letters and numbers in your passwords, special characters too.

Update your passwords regularly.

Use multi-factor authentication where possible.

Social engineering was so common when I first started to use social media.

I would constantly tell people not to take part in ‘fun quizzes’ asking for their ‘film star name’ which was the combination of their mother’s maiden name and their first pet, two things which could be used to answer their secret question when they had ‘forgotten their password’.

Honestly, sometimes, I feel as though much hasn’t really changed. I’m still reporting people who attempt to steal personal information online. There’s not a phishing email or scam SMS I don’t recognise. My nickname at university became ‘the internet’ because I was constantly educating people on digital hygiene and digital etiquette (also known as netiquette).

I used to sell my own data.

During my peak influencer phase, particularly the online fame that came with having a popular Tumblr blog circa 2009, I could sell anything. Cameras I’d used to take photographs, clothes I’d worn to events or in YouTube videos, books I’d read, books I hadn’t read etc.

I realised very quickly how digital marketing worked. A perfect example of my early interest in influencer marketing was when I bought a House of Holland dress in a sale. I sold it for twice as much on eBay by using an image of a celebrity wearing the same dress. It wasn’t the same dress the celebrity had worn, nor did I ever claim that it was, the image spoke for itself and convinced someone to buy it.

After my first year of university, I deleted my entire online presence.

Some people genuinely thought I had passed away. I went from being constantly plugged in to being well and truly unplugged.

I felt free, temporarily. I soon realised that due to the nature of my work and interests, I had to be online.

Whilst completing my BA (Hons) at university I used a service which gave companies access to my browser so that they could track my overall usage. Everything I clicked, they saw.

I’d get paid really small amounts of money but to me it was better than nothing. When you think about how many companies sell the data of their users without paying them, it is interesting that some will openly pay for it.

I mentioned this story on the Mudita forum in a discussion about Facebook paying teens $20 a month for total access to their phones.

Once I’d graduated with a BA (Hons), I went on to do an philosophy MA. Then I moved to Taiwan for a year, to teach. After Taiwan, I moved to Poland where I also taught for a while. I did the equivalent of another MA, this time in Digital Marketing (Squared Online).

I then went on to do a PhD, full-time, whilst working. I left due to the lack of teaching opportunities, support and general disinterest in my ideas. Some of my academic writing can be found on Academia.

I like startups and their potential for change.

Maybe it’s the collective fear that without the dedication of every single member of a startup, the whole company could fall apart. Sometimes those little adrenaline rushes can keep a team on the right path, together as one.

Here’s an interesting fact about me and technology. When I left teaching and started working in tech, I would pretend not to know how to do things, so that no one would ask me to do more things than I was already doing.

I’d make mistakes I could easily fix outside of work, on purpose, sometimes very subtle mistakes, sometimes larger ones, just to check if the person who requested the task was paying attention, to make it seem as though I really didn’t know what I was doing, as though I was still learning.

Although I do test other people’s knowledge from time to time, I tend not to do it in the same way anymore. I was in my early twenties and as it turns out, I was definitely still learning.

I am trying to make a difference.

When I started working at Mudita, I was already very aware of how overworking can cause burnout and how overuse of the internet can have a detrimental effect on your life. It wasn’t until further deeper investigation that I realised the scientific reasons why burnout is so common or in what ways your physical and mental health can be impacted.

As well as being Mudita’s Engagement Manager, I am also the founder and host of Women in Tech Chat, which helps thousands of women in technology to find support, jobs, mentorship, advice, inspiration, a sense of community and more.

I started the initiative because in various roles early on in my career, I was tired of being one woman working for and as part of teams consisting solely of men, for a long time.

There’s more information about why I started Women in Tech Chat here. I was also invited to discuss diversity and inclusion on WeTalk. The top tweets can be found here. Alternatively, you can read a summary here: ‘Hurtle diversity barriers with eyes wide open’.

It has taken a long time, a lot of tears, various contracts and several digital detoxes for me to truly understand how to exist online. My number one rule being to exist online as you would offline. If you wouldn’t put up with something in real life, don’t put up with it online. Block and move on.

Creating bots to keep communities thriving, automating my workflow by being able to schedule updates and posts and generally being able to step away from my computer from time to time has helped me to become the person I am today.

I use technology, technology doesn’t use me.

You can find me on Twitter and sometimes even GitHub. If you enjoyed reading this article, please share and recommend it!