Femgineer Spotlight: Carolyn Grabill, Software Engineer at Salesforce
By Justin Reyes This month Femgineer spotlight is Carolyn Grabill. Ever since high school Carolyn took the initiative to teach herself HTML/CSS to make …
By Justin Reyes
This month Femgineer spotlight is Carolyn Grabill. Ever since high school Carolyn took the initiative to teach herself HTML/CSS to make fan sites for the latest media she was into at the time. Though as she admits the hardest challenge was convincing her mom to let her to use her credit card to purchase domain hosting.
As a child, tinkering with the family computer, making spreadsheets and calendars, and seeing her mother in action as a database analyst led Carolyn to believe that she’d end up with a career in a technology. It was obvious to her that computers were fun to work with.
Studying computer science and learning to code at Vassar College she was recruited by Salesforce at Grace Hopper Celebration. Carolyn began full time at Salesforce after college and now works on the Custom Schema team, which is responsible for making tools that let customers create Custom Objects and Fields in their database which make up the core of the Salesforce Platform.
Being at Salesforce has allowed her to explore her creativity and pursue projects that she is passionate about. The project she is most proud of is the Schema Builder, which is a feature that lets you design a database schema in a visual, intuitive, and drag and drop format. “The other thing I love about it is that it is often featured in demo videos. Whenever I see one I get to say, ‘Hey, look at that! I worked on that!’”
But all of this couldn’t be done without the supportive managers at Salesforce that give their employees all the space and support their employees need to try out crazy and innovative ideas that will improve the product.
“I often feel like Salesforce is an undiscovered gem amongst young developers. Most of us had never heard of Salesforce prior 
to graduating college because it’s an enterprise company. But Salesforce is an incredibly fun place to work: we have fun offsites, parties, happy hours, people bring their pets to work, get paid to volunteer their time, have no-meeting-Thursdays, work-from-home support… I could go on and on”
Carolyn works on a really deep level on the Salesforce platform, and the features she releases affect everyone. Knowing this she does have moments when she feels imposter syndrome is about to strike.
“I have certainly felt impostor syndrome strike. When I found out what it was it was a complete ‘Aha’ moment. Whenever I catch myself holding back or thinking I’m not good enough, I make a mental note of it and think, ‘No, you can do better than that!’”
But on the other hands, she describes herself as a very competitive person who is also quite confident in herself. Carolyn jokes that growing up she always competed with her brother for better grades.Currently, she is very happy with the pace in which she is moving up in responsibility so she certainly doesn’t think that her moments of low confidence are holding her back. She has inspirational people at Salesforce like architect, Jeanine Walters and product management directors like Shawna Wolverton to thank for that.
Carolyn’s final words of advice for those getting started or new to tech are: “The hardest part of anything is getting started, and that’s especially true for software engineering.
For me, the hardest and most frustrating part of a software project is getting the development environment set up. I once spent a whole day downloading and setting up packages that the API I wanted to use was dependent on. Then I had to set up the projects that they were dependent on. It felt like it would never end!
The solution for someone just starting to learn to program is to learn in a space where your development environment is already set up for you like Codeacademy or where there are people on hand to help you do that, like an in-person programming class. Salesforce also comes with a built-in development environment and takes care of setting up and compiling. Learning to program in our language, Apex, is a great place to start for folks who are already familiar with Salesforce or just want to get started developing Salesforce Apps.”
Come out and meet Carolyn, and other technical women leaders at our next Femgineer Forum on June 19th at Salesforce! We’ll be talking about: Why You Should Consider Speaking at a Technical Conference, register here.
