All about me

Hello! I'm Salma. If you've seen me on the internet before, you might also know me as whitep4nth3r, 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 detour to musical comedy, my career transitioned 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, agencies and global e-commerce, and I transitioned to developer experience engineering in 2021. In 2021 I worked as a Developer Advocate for Contentful, and in 2022 I moved to Netlify, where I'm on the Developer Experience Engineering team.

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, which are mainly fun and silly websites. 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 – writes code for your entertainment. She currently works at Netlify as a Senior 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.

Active in the developer community, Salma is 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, roasts your code, and chats about the tech industry every week.