Joy in the details: Anna’s journey from conservation to coding
For our next instalment of Meet the Team, we had the pleasure of sitting down with Full-Stack Developer Anna Pokorska to hear about her fascinating background in arts conservation, and how that led her to working with Climate Policy Radar.
Anna, tell us a bit about yourself…
Hello I’m Anna. I’m a career changer, I started working as a developer just at the cusp of COVID starting (good timing you might say). Before that I was a museum restoration specialist and conservator, getting a PhD in the science-side of conservation. I was mostly working with physical materials, so in my case with modern plastics and how light affects them/deteriorates them in a museum context. Then I’d look at how we could protect the pieces, and how we might predict how they’d degrade. It was amazing work, but realised I didn’t want to get stuck in academic research and the conservation job market was saturated and competitive. But in doing my PhD, I learned that I just loved coding. It was really cool learning how to automate all the boring stuff in order to free me up to do all the fun stuff like conducting the actual analysis, and the scientific experiments on the materials themselves.
What excites you about Climate Policy Radar?
The impact we’re having every day on something so important.
Having done some work in a charity before CPR, and then comparing that to also working in investment banking, I knew I had to go back into the impact space. Whenever I get the chance to look up out of my coding work, like when we have our strategy days or when the leadership speaks to the team, I always feel so inspired and blown away by the impact we are having as an organisation.
What does a day in the life of a full stack application engineer look like?
Unsurprisingly, it’s a lot of sitting in front of a computer. Writing in a strange language. Being a ‘full stack’ engineer means I work on both ‘front-end’ and ‘back-end’. Up front is the stuff you can see when you come to the app and what’s called the user experience. The work behind the scenes in the back-end serves all the data to the front-end, make sure it’s all in the right formats and moving at a good speed - a bit like doing the plumbing!
I’ve been particularly focussed lately on getting all the long-text data ingested into our system from our climate data partners. For example, I was part of the team responsible for working to get all the data from the Multilateral Climate Funds into our system, so that funders and potential recipients alike can see what climate projects are being funded and where.
What can you usually be found doing Friday?
Friday is well earned rest. I also do some dancing outside of work - I regularly do Commercial and am planning to do some Salsa too - so you may very well find me in the dance studio!