Hey everyone! My name is Martina Rauert. If you've reached this page, I assume you want to know a little more about me, so strap in and here we go!
Developer by Day...
I grew up in a city called Prince Albert, in Saskatchewan Canada, with my mom, sister, stepdad, and cats Snickers and Jasper and dog Simba. I went to high school at the largest school in the province and graduated in 2007.
I have since moved to the city of Saskatoon. I went to the University of Saskatchewan and received my Bachelor of Science in Computer Science. It's also where I met my now husband, where our shared love of punk rock, sci-fi and fantasy, dry humour and introversion, and of course computers brought us together. We convocated on the same day in 2013, got married in 2018, and share our house with our 2 cats Coco and Sadie!
As a developer, I enjoy the problem solving aspect as a whole as well as playing around with new technologies. The world is my oyster! I even developed the website you see before you myself! I used a static site generator to build all of the galleries and image details pages you see here, as well as all of the image processing and watermarking.
I worked for 2 years as a software developer at a local digital agency, when I then got the call to join a local startup as their first developer hire. I was the 5th employee of this up and coming new company! That was back in 2015, and now we're a company of over 300 people! I love my job and all the great people I work with!
... Artist by Night
While programming is my job and also a great love of mine, art was my first passion. I was always the kid with my desk stuffed with pages of doodles, my favourite class was art, and I remember hounding any teacher that would listen to start up an "Art Club" - not that I knew what that meant, I just wanted to do more art!
Then once when I was about 8 or 9, my grandparents asked the age old question of "what do you want to be when you grow up?". I confidently stated I wanted to be an artist. I fully expected the response to be positive. After all, up until this point I had been nothing but praised for my artwork. I thought they would be proud of me for pursuing something I excelled at and for following my dreams.
Sadly I was met with the response: "Oh, no, you shouldn't do that."
I was shocked, I remember asking my mom over and over again why my grandparents thought I couldn't be an artist. She kept replying that they were just looking out for me, and that they didn't want me to become a "starving artist", meaning I wouldn't make any money off of it. And I just kept replying "but I thought I was good".
It's a small anecdote, but it had a poignant effect on my artistic pursuits for over 15 years. I thought if I could do perfect art, then I could one day become an artist. But striving for this perfection sucked out a lot of the joy I used to find in it. Instead, it was replaced with anxiety and disappointment when it didn’t turn out just right. And, obviously, I ended up choosing an entirely different profession as a result.
While I'm proud of a lot of the artwork I created in that time, once university ended I had no motivation to put myself through that tedium in my free time. I did an odd piece here or there, and not to say it was completely joyless, but it just brought up the old anxiety of getting it just right.
Then in 2017 I had had enough! I decided to challenge myself by making a goal to do a drawing a day, and a painting a week for the whole year. It was an effort to detach myself from the need for perfection, and also to try and rediscover if I did actually still have a passion for art.
And if you've made it this far, and browsed my website at all, I'm sure you've realised that the challenge was a success! I went on to do a drawing a day in 2018, and continue to make art a priority in my daily life to this day.
This isn't meant to be a sad story - it's my honest and earnest journey to get to where I am today. And I wouldn't change a thing! How lucky am I, to get to have not one but TWO passions in my life, and I get to share it with my favourite person whom I may not have met had I not pursued computer science as a profession over art. And that's why I'm a...