From life without parole to startup CTO (Ep. 522)
Welcome to a new year. For our first episode back, we’re featuring a chat with Jessica Hicklin, the CTO of Unlocked Labs. She describes what it was like to enter prison with a life sentence at the age of 16, how she taught herself to code in while incarcerated, and how she turned that into a new role as a software engineer and entrepreneur after being unexpectedly released at the age of 42.
Episode Notes
If you want to read more about Jessica, you can check out the blog we worked on together for the launch of our Overflow Offline initiative. If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like learning to code from an XML file of raw Stack Overflow data, be sure to check this episode out.
You can learn more about the Supreme Court case that led to Jessica’s release here.
Her company’s mission is to build a better justice system from the inside, specifically by educating incarcerated individuals so they can teach the next generation and have valuable skills upon release. Read more about Unlocked Labs here.
Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to mx0 for answering the question: How do you extract the ‘src’ attribute from an ‘img’ tag using Beautiful Soup?
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Tags: overflow offline, unlocked labs
2 Comments
Is the interviewee Jessica Hicklin, and is SHE a woman as your blog says, or is this Chris Santillan?
It appears a man’s voice to me.
The United States Supreme Court on June 25, 2012, issued an historic ruling in Miller v. Alabama and its companion case, Jackson v. Hobbs, holding that mandatory life-without-parole sentences for all children 17 or younger convicted of homicide are unconstitutional.