About Salma Alam-Naylor

Salma is looking at you, with a rather large smile. She's pointing across herself up to her left, with a very tatooed arm. She's wearing a black shirt and black rimmed glasses.

I write code for your entertainment.

I'm a live streamer, software engineer, and developer educator. I help developers build cool stuff with blog posts, videos, live coding and open source projects. I work at Sentry.

Speaker bio

Salma writes code for your entertainment. She specialises in streaming 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. She currently works at Sentry.

Active in the developer community, Salma is a GitHub Star, a Microsoft MVP for Developer Technologies, winner of the Jamstack Conf Community Creator Award 2021, and a partnered Twitch streamer where she builds weird websites and silly projects, roasts your code, and chats about the tech industry every week for your entertainment.

Long bio

Hello! I'm Salma, and I write code for your entertainment.

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 First Class Honours 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 side quest in musical comedy, I transitioned my career from music to tech 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, product agencies and global e-commerce, and I transitioned to developer experience engineering and developer education in 2021.

I've been streaming live coding on Twitch since 2020. My regular audience comprises beginners, mid-career developers and those with 20+ years experience who all come together to have fun with code and share experiences and advice. I build a variety of open source projects on stream, including fun and silly websites and helpful code examples to support educational tutorials. I also maintain a thriving 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, GitHub Star, 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!