She Inspires: Ankita Mishra
At Appwrite, we believe in celebrating women every day and not just on a single day. We have come together for a month-long celebration of women in various fields who inspire us. Today, I’m very fortunate to say that I work with a bunch of folks who appreciate and celebrate diversity whenever they can. Unfortunately, tech has quite the way to achieve that, even today.
As a man in tech, I would be highly ignorant not to recognize that the tech industry substantially lacks gender equity. In many societies and cultures (including my own), women are often discouraged from pursuing careers in engineering and tech. My experiences in student tech communities often show me a very similar scenario of massive disparity in gender ratio. Fortunately, I also found many exemplary women who have paved their way through the tech and community space and are regularly enabling others to do so. One such woman who has been highly impactful in my journey and whom I would like to thank is Ankita Mishra.
My first interaction with Ankita occurred when I joined Progate as a Community Intern at Progate, a coding education startup from Japan, in April 2020, where she was an India Community Associate. While a different member of the India Community team managed me, we had various joint team meetings allowing us to meet and interact. Throughout these meetings, Ankita always came across as a very attentive, patient, and benevolent individual. She was someone I looked up to from the very beginning, regardless of whether I was on her team or not.
Our interactions increased as Ankita grew on to become the India Community Manager for Progate and take the lead on Progate’s Mentorship Programme for their students, a program which I joined as a Mentor. In my limited experience in the tech community, I have very rarely found individuals as empathetic, caring, and passionate as Ankita. Ankita’s presence in communities has always been a warm one, and in those moments, it truly allowed us to find the best versions of ourselves (me especially). At the same, Ankita’s pragmatism and growth-focused mindset, one that she applies both to herself and the communities she builds, is one that I aspire to achieve.
I’m very privileged and thankful to have had Ankita as a mentor throughout my community journey; it has substantially influenced my perception of communities, without which I would not have moved towards a career in DevRel today. I only hope to see more such exemplary women grow through the community space and become beacons for all women (and men) out there. Their journeys and stories empower just as much as their work and actions, and the world can only become better with more of them winning and succeeding like Ankita is today.
