love what you do

Hello! I'm Salma. If you've seen me on the internet before, you might also know me as whitep4nth3r, and I help developers build stuff, learn things and love what they do.

I remember writing my first lines of code on a Commodore 64 when I was six years old, but I spent my childhood playing and composing music. I graduated from the Royal Northern College of Music (UK), with a degree in music composition in 2008.

After a few years working as a composer, musician, and rock band teacher, I qualified as a school music teacher in 2012. After a brief detour to musical comedy, my career transitioned from music to technology in 2014 when I found my first front end development job. (If you'd like a more detailed history of my journey so far, tune into the GitHub README podcast, recorded in October 2021!)

I've worked as a front end developer and tech lead for startups, agencies and global e-commerce, and I transitioned to developer experience engineering in 2021. I've worked at Contentful, and I'm now a Staff Developer Experience Engineer at Netlify.

I stream live coding on Twitch twice a week, with a focus on being inclusive and accessible to all levels of experience. I maintain a variety of open source projects that I build live on stream, and these range from fun and silly websites, to projects for social change that seek to elevate women and marginalised communities in the technology industry, such as womenwhostream.tech and womenofjamstack.com. I also maintain a thriving and diverse Discord community, where people can ask for tech help, career advice, or hang out and co-work during the day.

As well as a partnered Twitch streamer, I am a Microsoft MVP for developer technologies, and was the winner of the Jamstack Conf 2021 Community Creator Award.

I regularly speak on podcasts, at technology conferences, events, meet-ups and pair-programme on live streams. Get in touch if you'd like to work with me!

Salma — or whitep4nth3r – helps developers build stuff, learn things and love what they do. She currently works at Netlify as a Staff Developer Experience Engineer, streams live coding, and loves helping people get into tech. After a career as a music teacher and comedian, Salma transitioned to technology in 2014, working as a front end developer and tech lead for startups, agencies and global e-commerce.

Salma is active in the developer community. She is a Microsoft MVP for Developer Technologies, partnered Twitch streamer, and relentless advocate for building a truly accessible web. Founder of unbreak.tech, womenwhostream.tech, and womenofjamstack.com, her projects call for social change and equality in the technology industry, and her expertise is the Jamstack and related front end web technologies. Salma believes that tech is the future, and everyone is welcome to build stuff, learn things, and love what they do.