Mina Markham

The front-end architect tells us about her work for Hillary Clinton and encouraging girls to code

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No one likes being on the losing side, but for Mina Markham (mina. codes) it must be tougher than most. She recently spent over a year working for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, putting her all into creating and maintaining Pantsuit, the brilliantly named pattern library powering Clinton’s web presence, as well as creating various micro sites along the way and coping with the sheer pace at which a political campaign moves.

In a parallel universe she’s doubtless insanely proud of her contributions to getting the first female president into the White House; in this one she’s having to adjust to the realities of life in Donald Trump’s America (at the time of writing, he’s still US President, but anything could happen between now and publication). Political campaigns being the way they are, the election saw Markham out of a job.

Following a couple of months as a lady of leisure, however, things are looking up for Markham again; a few days before we spoke to her, she confirmed that she’s got a new job, which means she’ll shortly be upping sticks and moving from New York to California, where she’s taking up a new post at Slack’s Oakland headquarters. When we managed to catch up with her she was in the middle of preparations for moving cross-country to California, and about to hit Broadway and see the current musical phenomenon, Hamilton (after which she also managed to snatch a selfie with top science communicator, Neil Degrasse Tyson).

Before this, though, we managed to get her to answer a few questions about her career, her dedication to encouraging girls – especially black girls – to get into coding, her love of Sass, her talk at Generate New York on 28 April and much more; here’s what she had to say.

 Could you tell us a bit about your professional background?