Natalia Miller (en)
This is a blog post by Neil Taylor, for International Women’s Day 2021. You can find the Welsh version here.
Dyma blog gan Neil Taylor, ar gyfer Diwrnod Rhyngwladol Y Menywod 2021. Cewch ffindio’r fersiwn Cymraeg yma.
Natalia Miller graduated from Aberystwyth University in 2015, with a BSc in Computer Science. In the past year, Natalia has become the Software Engineer Team Lead for the BBC Search and Navigation. The Search and Navigation team enables the audience to find content across multiple BBC platforms, including iPlayer, BBC Online and the BBC apps.
Natalia was an active member of the department, taking on the roles of Demonstrator, to help with peer-learning, and Student Ambassador, to help students find out what it is like to study in the department.
As part of her course, Natalia took an industrial year at The Walt Disney Company. She worked as a Junior Software Developer in a team that was developing a B2B Financial system with a range of technologies including JavaScript in the web browser and Java technologies for the server application.
Whilst Natalia was on her Industrial Year in London, she helped young girls to learn to code by using Scratch. This was at the Stemettes Summertime Hackathon in July 2014. Natalia noted: “I found this really rewarding as I was inspiring young girls to get into coding. I really had to adapt my way of speaking to the girls as they were all different ages. I had to come up with ways of explaining what the code does in the way that they would understand.”
Natalia’s interest in helping children code continues with her involvement in Code Club in recent years. She has also been a mentor for University students, taking part in the North West Tech Challenge in 2016.
After graduating, Natalia joined the BBC as a Graduate Software Engineer. This role allowed her to work in four different areas of the BBC over two years. After the graduate role, she moved on to be a Software Engineer in the Sports and Live Services team. Over the following years, Natalia became Senior Software Engineer and Technical Lead in the team. In March 2020, she moved to become the Software Engineering Team Lead on the Search and Navigation team at the BBC.
In a talk at the BCS Lovelace Colloquium in 2019, she noted that in her Software Engineering roles, there is the need to be ‘always learning’, ‘thinking of the bigger picture’ and ‘mentoring others’. These qualities are shown through her activities, both in her work at Disney and the BBC, as well as her involvement in wider activities such as Code Club and the Stemettes.
