Hiro Nishimura wears many hats, and loves them all. She had brain surgery as a senior in college in 2011, and founded Burgundy for Life, a vascular malformation and brain injury awareness organisation to help others experiencing similar disabilities. In 2014, she graduated with her Master’s in Special Education and moved to New York City, where she began her career in technology. She currently works as a Technical Services Engineer at an Alphabet startup in NYC and a contributing writer at the INSIDER. In the evenings, she tirelessly churns out articles as a Technical Writer for AWS Newbies.

A year ago, she was diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis, and has been on chemo treatment since then. She hopes to one day bring the intersection of disability, education, and tech into her career and work in EdTech to create accessible and affordable Assistive Technology.

I’m excited to be interviewing Hiro today because her life experiences have given her an inspiring, strong attitude on life, and I’d love to see what she does next. Grab a pot of tea for this one! 🍵

Hi Hiro! I hope you’ve had a good day so far. Can you tell us more about your interest in AWS and how you started your website AWS Newbies?

Hi, Georgie! Thanks so much for having me! I’m super excited!

So I began my career in tech almost by accident. After graduating from college in 2014, I moved to NYC without a job. I was hoping to get a job in a disability advocacy or education related nonprofit here. Unfortunately, half a year and hundreds of submitted resumes later, I still didn’t have a job.

It was then that I sent in an application to be a recruiter at a recruiting firm. They brought me in, and said, “So… We know you applied to be a recruiter, but would you be interested in trying tech support? We have a client who needs a help desk engineer. The thing is, they are a Japanese company, so they need someone who is bilingual. We understand you have no background in tech, but we can teach technical skills, but we can’t teach language skills.”

Well. I didn’t have a job, and with my sublet expiring at the end of the month, needed a job or move back home, so I said why not give it a try! And that’s how randomly my career in tech started. I decided that if I didn’t like it or couldn’t do it, I can always quit, but it’s not always that you get to try out a completely different field with no qualifications!

Coming in with 0 background in tech into a tech support role meant that I had to teach myself everything very quickly. Thankfully, I’m pretty good at Googling and learning on the job, so I have managed to do pretty well in this aspect. Since then, I’ve moved jobs twice, and currently work as a Technical Services Engineer at an AdTech start up.

My interest in Amazon Web Services and Cloud Computing started earlier this year, when one of my friends got a six-figure salary job at Google after getting an AWS certification. He had no prior experiences with the cloud, but he was hired immediately after earning his certification on the basis of this said cert. Since my team had recently brought in AWS into our infrastructure, and we were migrating a lot of services to it, I decided this would be a great system to look into. Turns out AWS is a lot bigger and robust in services than I could’ve ever imagined!

Since I was already considering moving into Cloud Engineering as a career track after my tech support jobs, it was a natural progression in interest.

Unfortunately, I found quickly that there are not very many resources available for people who don’t “speak the lingo.” Most documentations and trainings resources are extremely dense and tech-jargon-heavy, so I had a very difficult time learning. After a while, I decided that the best way to find the kinds of resources that I wanted for myself but couldn’t find was to just make them myself.

So 2 weeks before my scheduled exam, AWS Newbies was born! I created a comprehensive resource to study for the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam in a week and a half (about 35 articles), and passed!

After I passed the exam, I shared my website on a very large group called Tech Ladies. I explained my mission of creating a resource for fellow “AWS newbies” like myself, trying to learn Cloud Computing but not sure where to start, especially when coming in from non-technical fields. I had an amazing reaction from the post, with many fellow tech ladies telling me that they were looking for a resource like this.

Even more exciting was that several large tech companies reached out to see if I’d be interested in working as a technical writer. Since hadn’t seriously considered that doing something I enjoy to help me study could be an actual side job, it was a pretty exciting realisation!

You must obviously like online AWS courses, right? 😄 What other online courses have you enjoyed, learned a lot from, or would recommend?

I take random online courses for a lot of things! For AWS, I really enjoy A Cloud Guru. They have courses on various other cloud computing systems catered to people without technical backgrounds. One mini-course I particularly recommend is ACG Fundamentals. They break down technical skills and concepts that are “basic” to people who have a tech background, but are completely foreign to the rest of us, like SSH and CLI.

In the past, I’ve taken Udemy courses for stuff like Python, HTML, and Bootstrap, and have had mixed results (quality control isn’t Udemy’s strong point… LOL). For learning web frameworks, I recommend Udemy instructor Brad Hussey. I first learned about Bootstrap from one of his courses, and he covers a lot of topics!

You went to AWS Summit in New York, how was the experience? (Such a bummer it was actually when I was visiting NY and we missed each other, haha.)

I did! And I am so sad we missed each other! So close and yet so far! Haha.

The AWS Summit was pretty big – it was held in Javits Center in Hudson Yards (where they hold New York Comic Con). They announced a lot of things there, and had dozens of presentations, labs and vendor booth area where vendors using AWS shared their technologies. It was free, and gave us a pretty decent lunch! ;)

One funny occurrence was that their AWS labs broke down during the day, and it was running on AWS… Not a very good advertisement! LOL.

You’re currently based in New York, but you seem to have moved to a new city several times throughout your life. Where have you spent time so far and how did you get to where you are now?

I indeed have. I was born in Kyoto, Japan. I moved to the US when I was 7 because of my dad’s job, and was raised in Maryland. I lived there for almost 2 decades before I moved to New York City after I finished graduate school. I’ve been living in NYC for a little over 4 years now!

It’s my first and only city! I’ve always lived in more suburb-y places. And honestly, I never thought I’d live in a city-city, because I’m not very good with people and crowded places. The one time I visited Tokyo back when I was a teenager, I was like, “Omg. I can’t do this. I’d never live in a city!” It was so crowded, hot, and overwhelming! But a decade later, here I am!

It was a huge adjustment for me, coming from a suburban background to city living. In the beginning, I had panic attacks every time I got on the subway because of the claustrophobia. But now I can’t imagine living without the accessibility of being able to walk to anywhere I want to go, and if I wanted to get to the destination faster, I can just take a train for $2.75 to basically anywhere in the city. I regularly walk 5 miles to get soup dumplings in Flushing Chinatown.

You were diagnosed with a vascular disorder at what many people would consider the young age of 22. Life threw you this curveball, but post-surgery, you were able to remain positive. Can you sum up how your perspective and outlook on life changed?

I was diagnosed with a very rare vascular disorder called Arteriovenous Malformation when I was 22. I’ve written about it a lot on my blog, like on accepting my mortality at the young age of 22 and finding myself surrounded by EMT in my bathroom after a grand mal seizure.

Half a year after my diagnosis, and 3 grand mal seizures later, I had brain surgery (craniotomy). Through the 7 hour surgery, they removed 3 AVMs from my brain.

As a result of the brain surgery, I am AVM and seizure free, but sustained acquired brain injury. I had to relearn how to move my fingers, sit up, walk… Basically everything except talking ;) I was later diagnosed with executive function disorder, generalised anxiety disorder, idiosyncratic hypersomnolence, and a few other random conditions.

I also became slightly aphasic, which means I have some issues with language expression – word retrieval and the such. This really put a dampener in my life-long hobby of reading and writing. Coupled with the executive function disorder which made my task management and prioritisation essentially defunct, it was the perfect recipe for disaster in the context of graduate school, where you are expected to read, write, and turn in projects on a self-assigned timeline.

As they say, you don’t know how strong you are until being strong is the only option you have. I could either be swallowed by my new disabilities and remain unable to finish my college education, work, or live independently, or I could accept my new deficits and find ways to work around them. I became my own Case Study #1 for accommodations so that I could reclaim my young adulthood.

Everyone around me was telling me and my mom that I am never going to be able to drive, live independently, or hold down a full-time job. That I would be dependent on my parents for the rest of my life because of my brain injury. I was 24. I hadn’t even started my life yet!

So I left home right after I graduated, to be in an environment where no one knew my background or my disabilities. I was wholly prepared for the whole situation to disintegrate at any moment, and I’d be forced to go back home. I wouldn’t be able to hold down a job, or I wouldn’t be able to live on my own. Or I would become gravely ill again. I was prepared for any of that to happen.

But I was also confident that even if I’d “failed” and had to go back home, at least I can say that I tried my best. I didn’t want to live the rest of my life wondering “What if…” So I took a chance and moved to NYC, and surprisingly, I’m still here!

Coming back from “brink of death” (I wish I was being dramatic, but I literally had my brain sliced open…), I came to appreciate the little small things in life. I know my time may be “limited,” but that any time is better than the no time that may have been the result of one of my many seizures or possibly my AVM exploding. I had a ticking time bomb in my brain that could cause a stroke at any provocation, and any day I had was a blessing.

I lost a lot in terms of my body’s functions during the ordeal, including my cognitive and motor abilities. But I also was able to experience the confidence that comes from being able to accommodate my newly found “deficiencies,” and in many cases, completely masking them to the point that they do not impact my life anymore.

If I have gained any skill or insight with all the curve balls thrown at me, it is that I am adaptable and malleable. I will be able to mold myself to any situation and take advantage of the opportunities that may not be in plain sight to create a life for myself. That life may be very different from the one I had imagined, but still amazing in its own way.

Had I not had my grand mal seizure and brain surgery, and had I not crawled back from brain injury (about 1/6th of my brain is essentially “dead” because brain cells do not regenerate), I would not be living in New York City, working with cutting-edge tech, and forging this exciting career right now. So it seems strange to say, but I’m glad I had this experience, as horrifying and painful as it was.

With the internet and online networks as your tools, you started Burgundy for Life, to support survivors of vascular malformation, stroke and brain injury, as well as families of those survivors. Beyond being passionate about keeping it going, where do you hope to see it going in the future?

Burgundy for Life was my lifeline and passion for many years. I started it a year after my brain surgery, in 2013. It was my way to “pay it forward” to the community that needed resources and an understanding community as much as I did.

I was so lonely and afraid, and during the half year leading up to my surgery and the painful recovery for months and years to come, felt like I was the only person going through that. After I began Burgundy for Life and started holding an offline support group for local AVM and Brain Aneurysm survivors, I found out that there were at least 2 AVM survivors RIGHT ON MY COLLEGE CAMPUS! That definitely brought perspective to my “alone in this journey” sentiments. But I didn’t have the ability to find these people while I was going through the hardest times, so I strove to create that community for others.

My Burgundy for Life Facebook page has almost 3,600 followers, and the online support group has almost 1,400 members. I created a comprehensive link database for AVM, Brain Injury, and Brain Aneurysm resources at AVM Awareness Project because I had such difficulties finding easy to comprehend information about Arteriovenous Malformations. Full disclosure, I didn’t know that there was a difference between AVMs and Brain Aneurysm until half a year AFTER I had my surgery! Womp womp. (They are very different.)

I wanted to create a place for people to connect, and also a place to find resources that are comprehensible by laypeople. There are plenty of resources for medical professionals to explain AVMs, Brain Aneurysms, Strokes, Brain Injuries, and treatment methods. But back then, there was not much catered to the family members or the patients themselves. So I tried to bridge the gap in information.

This project helped me find that I have the ability to deconstruct technical jargon into plain text, so here I am, 6 years later, exploring technical writing as a side hustle!

Back in the days, I was hoping to make it a nonprofit. But after talking to people who run nonprofits, it seems like it’s better off being a pet project, as becoming a nonprofit puts a lot of constraints on activities because of regulations. So for now, I run it out of my apartment, providing resources and community to people going through hardships.

In the future, I hope to create a foundation to provide scholarships to survivors to go back to school, and a consulting service for people with brain injuries and other disabilities to join the workforce.

Personally I’ve worked with technical writers and admire their work, but I’m aware that some people think they do nothing! I’d love to hear your take on why technical writers matter, and the important things you folks contribute to and do!

I’d imagine it’s like editors, right? People don’t really understand what goes into the job, so they assume they’re accessories to the people doing the “real” work. (For editors, it’s the authors “actually” writing, and for technical writers, the people who made the technology.) But without editors, there will be no literary masterpieces!

I started my stint as a “technical writer” with my deconstructing medical jargon for the general public with Burgundy for Life. Perhaps it’s due to my background as a special education teacher, but I’ve always enjoyed and found meaning in ingesting a large amount of dense information and spitting it out in a more easily digestible form.

I spent a lot of time explaining what Arteriovenous Malformation is, what Brain Aneurysms are, what kinds of treatments are available, etc. for audiences with no medical knowledge. It was a kind of resource I wished I had when I was going through my medical catastrophe, when I didn’t have the bandwidth go through pages and pages of very dense medical texts in order to understand what options I had. Over the years, my infographics, printables, and pages have been shared hundreds of thousands of times, and I periodically see my infographics printed out and used in random vascular malformation related events and conferences.

In the same vein, I believe I am doing a similar job for technical writing. I want to make these tools accessible to people who are interested, but can’t easily deconstruct the technical jargons used to explain them. I don’t think “not having technical lingo” should prevent people who want to learn about technologies to access the training resources.

So with AWS Newbies, and courses and articles, I strive to be that “bridge” between the technology and “real people.” There’s place and time for very dense technical documentations, but my audience isn’t it. I want more people like me to have access to the information necessary to make their dreams come true, or advance in their chosen fields!

In the technology industry, it’s common for people to move from company to company, with just two years being considered a “long time”. Does this feel like a long time to you? In your experience, do you experience growth at companies quite quickly, do you find that it’s slow, or does it depend on where you work?

Oh yes. I so feel this right now. I’m coming up on my 2nd year soon at this company, and given I haven’t technically had a promotion, I feel like I’ve overstayed my comfort zone! This is my 3rd job in 3.5 years. My first job was for 10 months, my second for 1 year and 2 months. Both times, I was head-hunted out to the next job, to do very different things (though all in IT). Having a diverse set of experiences within the context of IT has given me a lot of ammunition to know what I want and don’t want from my next position.

It really does seem as though the way to get substantial raises and promotions in the tech industry is generally through hopping jobs, rather than staying in one place. Even my superiors are telling me that to get the salary I want, I need to quit, or quit and come back to re-negotiate. As someone who’s ok with being loyal to a company as long as it treats me well, it strikes me as so unnecessary that I need to come back with an offer to get them to match my salary ask! Let’s cut out the bureaucracy dance and just give me what you know I deserve? Apparently that’s not how it works! ;(

I grow quite quickly into roles I take, so while I hop into a job with basically 0 experience every time, after a few months, I become fairly competent. At that point, I need to continue learning to feel fulfilled. That was something that was lacking in my previous 2 jobs, because they were more “old fashioned.” Every role had a set number of responsibilities, so it didn’t really matter how well I did my set of tasks – it was someone else’s job to do the other tasks, so I didn’t get to try them.

Being a start up, this current company operates very differently. If I show that I am motivated and willing to learn, they’re willing to offload more responsibilities. So I’ve grown tremendously in terms of technical skills in the past year and a half. I’m ready for a title change!

On a similar note, we’ve mentioned job-hopping before, and not too long ago you were hoping to settle in an area of technology that you specialised in. Do you think you’ve found what you are most passionate about now?

I think I’m settled for now on becoming a Cloud Engineer! Getting my AWS certifications is my way of establishing my technical skills and ability to learn, because I don’t have the “credentials” of an IT or engineering degree. I enjoy working with SaaS and Cloud computing, so I hope to make this transition within the next year.

Whether that’ll be with this current company or somewhere else remains to be seen! And I guess the beauty of being in one of the tech capitals of the world is that I have a lot of options in terms of employment once I have the skillsets and direction.

I feel that for a long time you’ve been open about mental health when writing about it on your blog or sharing your story online. Is this the case, or was it difficult but gradually become easier with the growing amount of articles openly discussing mental health?

I am a very strong proponent of “Mind over matter.” It doesn’t matter what’s going on in your life; the most important thing is your mental health. I believe that how you perceive a situation or how you deal with difficult life events has great bearing on determining how you will fare.

Mental illness is a very difficult thing, and I have a very long history with it. I was diagnosed with clinical depression in middle school, and bipolar disorder in 10th grade. I was medicated for over a decade under the assumption that I had these mental illnesses. Now, after my whole AVM experience, we think that the “bipolar disorder” was actually a manifestation of my AVMs growing in my brain during adolescence. The pressing of the overgrown blood vessels into my frontal lobe, which is responsible for your executive function and mood, probably had something to do with my disordered moods.

After my surgery, it was like a curtain was pulled back. I still have ups and downs (as I’m sure everyone does), but I no longer have the sustained feeling of doom like my days pre-surgery. Many things have happened then, including brain injury that robbed me of many abilities I took for granted, a very messy break up (my boyfriend of 5 years cheated on me with my roommate), becoming physically disabled due to rheumatoid arthritis, being on chemo medication, having relationship issues with my family, and workplace bullying at previous company. But it has been a lot easier for me to accept the situation and work around the darkness in my mind than when I was younger.

I can generally keep a pretty positive outlook on life now, perhaps because I was so close to death at one point, and encountered situations where I was about to lose everything multiple times. I’ve come to find that letting myself feel the anger or disappointment or sadness or betrayal when I am experiencing it is much more productive than trying to push them away or lock them up. I allow myself to cry when I need to, or be angry. Then, with the initial emotional outburst out of the way, I can more clearly analyse the situation to see if there is a silver lining somewhere to reframe my perception.

I feel that it’s important to share my experiences, especially as it pertains to very severe illnesses and disabilities, because it is very rare to see people talking about it. There is a perception that mental health is secondary to the “actual medical issue,” and that the depression or anxiety of the patient or their family is not as important as the physical disease itself.

There is so much stigma around mental illnesses and anything to do with the brain, including brain injury, that I feel like as a survivor, I have a responsibility to help be one of the rungs on a ladder to help dismantle the unfair perceptions. We may be different, and we may have different needs, but that doesn’t make us “less” or “unable.” There are things we can and cannot do, but most of the time, what we need most are compassion and accommodations. With the right amount of accommodations and modifications, we are able to thrive. But in this society, we are not given those tools, and so many of us are unable to realise the true potentials we have.

If I didn’t have a background in special education, I don’t think I would be able to do what I do now. It was only because I knew that I can accommodate for “deficiencies” in my skillsets with some creativity, that I was able to find myself in a world not meant for “us” and still pursue a career. Life was not as kind to many of my friends struggling with similar disorders or disabilities, and I hope to one day find ways to help as many people as possible work through the limits society places upon us.

When I express that I have rheumatoid arthritis, I am met with sympathy and offer for accommodations to my work and condolences. It isn’t perceived as something that will impact my work or ability to do things. When it’s a brain injury, people automatically start doubting my capabilities and abilities as a professional, asking inappropriate questions and making assumptions of my limitations. In my experiences, mental illnesses are treated similarly; either they aren’t “real,” or they make you “unfit to work.” In my experiences, my physical disabilities are real, but unless it pertains to something physical, and people are “understanding.” When it’s invisible, it’s either “not real,” or it brands you as incompetent.

But ableism also dictates that the physical disability not be a visible disability in order to be offered compassion. People with visible differences like limb deformities or Dwarfism experience a great level of discrimination, as well as wheelchair users and people who are blind. It seems to me that people want “aesthetically pleasing” disabilities, where they aren’t made uncomfortable by having to perceive something that is “too different” visually.

Coming back to the point of mental illnesses, I’m very glad for the growing number of articles these days openly discussing mental health, including those by celebrities. I feel like even just a few years ago, I felt fairly alone in discussing mental illnesses in “public.” The difference in the way my invisible disability is treated (brain injury) and my physical disability is treated (rheumatoid arthritis) is very telling of the stigma still surrounding “brain stuff,” and I think as more people talk about their own experiences, society will have to start changing its stance on the way it treats people with mental illnesses.

You’ve been keenly keeping track of your finances and finding ways to save recently. What are some actions you’ve taken that have stopped you from spending a lot of money, or tricks that have really worked for you to save more?

Ahhh yes. Hiro the Personal Finance fiend! I think most of my close friends are so tired of me talking about money these days! I’ve always been nervous about money and had acute sense of needing to make more/finding ways to save/having side hustles, because when I moved to NYC, I was living on $300/week I got from babysitting.

The difference in what I can do compared to many of my friends who make 6 figures was very apparent. Even when I got a full-time job, it was $14/hr for the first 3 months, then $37k/yr. Not nearly enough to live comfortably in NYC. For a few years, I was working 3 nights a week as a tutor, for a while making $1000/mo doing that. Since I got this current job, my income went up a little bit, so I no longer tutor. But I am always looking for ways to have enjoyable side hustles that can give me an income and also grow my skillsets. These days, I petsit, write, and participate in user interviews for some extra cash.

My “need” for financial literacy really hit last year, when I became physically disabled from Rheumatoid Arthritis. I was suddenly hit with the realisation that hey, I had a pretty good few years after my last medical catastrophe, but I could be robbed of my ability to work at any time. The permanent disability rate (where the person is unable to work) is pretty high, and at that point, I’d lost so much of my range of motion and was living in so much pain that it seemed very likely that within a few months, I’d be unable to work.

I thankfully “came back” from that brink after FINALLY finding a doctor who would take my pain seriously and not dismiss it as attention seeking behavior (I talked about it here), and starting chemo treatment. I’ve been on chemo for a little over a year now, taking weekly pills, and am doing much much better.

But the realisation that I can one day work, and the next day not, really jolted me. I needed to create a situation for myself where if that were to happen, my life was so efficient and needs basic that I can afford to live. That’s when I found the Personal Finance community on Twitter. Joining them really changed my financial life. I was always a saver, but after having a community to share my struggles and triumphs with, I was able to hit my goal of saving $20,000 in 2018 in August. It’s a pretty big accomplishment because I make $60,000/yr, and our tax rate is pretty high.

I’m pursuing what’s called “Financial Independence,” which means that you no longer need to work to have the income you need to live on (for the rest of your life). This could be in the form of having enough investments (like real estate or stocks) to provide you dividends or rent, or having passive income (maybe a book or course) or you just have so much saved up you can live on it indefinitely.

Yeah. Sounds like an unrealistic dream, right? But I have 2 friends who are going to achieve it before they’re 30 years old! So it’s a possibility if I find a way. I want to at least get to a place where I work because I want to work there, not because I HAVE to work there for the paycheck.

The way I save over 50% of my take home and put in 20% of my salary into my 401k on top of that on $60,000 in NYC is by using the “pay myself first” method. I explained it a bit in my blog post a few months ago, but basically, I have auto transfers set up so that my checking account is artificially low in balance.

The day after my first paycheck of the month hits my checking, it automatically gets sent to my savings account and my investment portfolio account. This way, I never “see” it, so I don’t get any inclination to spend it. I also send everything I make with my side hustles into a high interest savings account. It’s very hard for me to know how much I’ve spent when the bank balance is too high, so by keeping my checking balance low, I can keep tabs on how much I spent from month to month. I also use mint.com to keep track of everything transaction I make (and it pings me when I’m overspending!).

I try to limit to buying consumables. When I am inclined to buy something that’s not food or shampoo, I ask myself, “Do I really need this? What unique use do I have for it in my life? Can I use something else for this purpose instead?” It seems cliche, but these questions have saved me thousands of dollars and my apartment from so much clutter in the past year!

I think most important is the community and social group I keep. Online, I have my Personal Finance community, where I can ask questions and share my accomplishments. It’s hard to do in “real life” because money is such a taboo concept. In person, people know that I like to save more than spend, so my friends are used to us eating at places that don’t cost much (but still delicious!). I really enjoy surprising them with the bill every time I introduce them to a new restaurant, because they expect them to be so much higher.

Next month is AVM (Arteriovenous Malformation) Awareness Month. What are your plans for it and how can other people learn more or get involved? 🙂

Yes it is! It’s not as accepted as Brain Aneurysm Awareness Month (September), but people manage to do things here and there. I don’t have a set plan for it, honestly. I get wiped out with the campaign I run every September on my Burgundy for Life facebook page where I put up one Brain Aneurysm fact a day every day for a month. I hope one day I’ll have a set for AVMs!

Most people find out about AVMs when they or their loved one is diagnosed. For the past 6 years, I’ve worked to try to change that, at least in my circle of influences.

I would LOVE for people to learn more about AVMs and get involved. I provide a lot of resources on Burgundy for Life’s facebook page, and also have a few resources I’ve created over the years:

• Arteriovenous Malformation (Video)
• What’s Arteriovenous Malformation?
• AVM Factsheet
• Burgundy for Life
• Burgundy for Life Facebook Page

And my favorite foundations and people for AVM awareness are:

• The Aneurysm and AVM Foundation
• Nikki, young founder of Butterfly AVM Charity in UK: Video 1 and video 2

Thanks SO much for having me, and I apologise for the wall of text! I hope next time we’re in close proximity, we’ll get to meet up for some tea and cakes!

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I’m sure you can all agree with me that Hiro’s story is inspiring and proof that nothing should get in the way of letting us achieve what we want to achieve. ⭐ Hiro is a true star and I was so glad to be able to share her story. You can find Hiro on her blog, and she is regularly on Twitter. She also showcases her work and experience on her portfolio at hiroko.io.

To find out about more women in tech from around the world with different backgrounds and experiences, check out other Hey Girlfriend! interviews. A new interview is posted every month.