Soldering irons and resistors may not sound like the most traditional toys for a five-year-old, but for Mozilla’s Director VP of Firefox Runtime, Selena Deckelmann, they turned out to be formative. “My grandfather is a TV repairman so I was surrounded by electronics from a very early age. Everywhere I went I had the opportunity to play, and I was really encouraged to make messes and ask questions.”
She credits these stretches of unstructured play (along with some early Morse Code lessons) as the reason she first got interested in STEM. Although a career as a violinist looks like it was on the cards (her school suggested she took up a hobby because “I was always bossing other kids and telling the teacher I was bored!”) when she went to university, someone introduced her to the Internet, and that was it. “It blew my mind. I was immediately thrown into this world of people messing around with computers, learning how to compile Linux, putting a computer together for the first time. From that point on I was hooked.”