Vanessa Sochat has built her software engineering and computer science career in an unconventional way. After earning an undergraduate degree in Psychology, her first research assistant job involved using command line software and writing scripts. “I had no idea what I was doing, nor did anyone teach me, but I thrived in this environment,” she says. Vanessa recently joined LLNL to work on the BUILD project, Spack package manager, and other open-source initiatives. She was one of the original developers of the Singularity container technology, and she created and continues to produce the RSE Stories podcast. Read Vanessa’s profile at LLNL Computing.