Monica Lent - Tech and Travel Blogger, Software Engineer #106
Biography
Monica Lent is an American software engineer and engineering manager living and working in Berlin, Germany.
She started coding when she was 10 years old, and hasn’t stopped since then. In her 10+ year technical career (not including coding as a kid 😉), Monica has worked in a wide range of domains such as cloud services, natural language processing, e-learning, and fintech.
She has taken on roles ranging from individual contributor to technical lead and manager.
Most recently, she was leading a distributed team of 15+ frontend engineers at SumUp, a German fintech company. During her time there the company grew from 80 people to more than 1,500 people over the course of 5 years.
Today, Monica is building her own startup called Affilimate, a tool that helps bloggers earn more from their content with actionable affiliate analytics. It’s currently in private beta, but you’re welcome to email her for an invite or about partnership opportunities. In my spare time, Monica blogs about travel and photography on Not a Nomad Blog, which reaches over 60,000 unique readers per month.
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A note from Grant
For some time now, perhaps due to my own love of tech and travel, I’ve been on the lookout for potential guests who work in tech and travel, or at least work in a country other than their native one. We’ve had on a few such guests in the past who have moved abroad to work for a company, but today’s guest, Monica Lent, is, I believe, the first guest to build travel into the very fabric of her work in tech.
On top of the travel aspects of her life, she also brings a unique education background in that she majored in the Classics and minored in Computer Science at the University of Arizona.
Along her journey in tech, she’s worked in cloud services, natural language processing, e-learning and fintech, holding down roles like developer, frontend engineer, research associate and tech lead.
These days, she’s the founder of her own startup Affiliimate and a prolific blogger on both travel and tech, primarily for two content sites she started: Not a Nomad and Blogging for Devs.
-Grant Ingersoll
Quotes
“I never really planned to blog for money or to be a successful blogger. So when I started this travel blog it was primarily just to document my time living in Europe. During that Time I also learned more about photography so it became sort of like a side project for me. And slowly what happened over time is Google became more and more interested in my content.”
“If you want to write technical tutorials it’ll be a better investment of your time to optimize for SEO. So in the future, when you’re googling your own problem, you come across your own blog post. You just have to put yourself in the mindset of whoever will be discovering your content.”
—Monica Lent
Additional Resources
Learn more about Affilimate - https://affilimate.com/about/
Learn more about Blogging for Devs - https://bloggingfordevs.com/
Check out Monica’s blog travel blog - https://notanomadblog.com/
Connect with Monica Lent
LinkedIn
Twitter
https://monicalent.com/
