Technology from end to end
It is just a click away that one senses Yara Polana’s speed, good energy and desire to make an impact. Living between two very different poles, Reykjavík and Los Angeles, this Mozambican works as a senior developer.
It is impossible to think of the Icelandic capital, Reykjavík, without imagining the low temperatures and the few hours of daily sunshine that characterise it. Small details in the life of Yara Polana, a young Mozambican with a degree in Visual Communication who lives between the cold of northern Europe and the mild temperatures of Los Angeles, the most populous city in the western United States. Yara left Mozambique 10 years ago because she felt she lacked higher education options in multimedia. At the time, when she left Maputo International Airport in July 2011, the destination was Norway, but her journey coincided with the Oslo and Utøya attacks, and the young woman had doubts about whether this would be the best place to live. Instead, she enrolled at the Iceland University of the Arts.
Today, at 33, Polana works in an area at the heart of the development of many nations and feels she has an active role in building change. “Technology is always evolving; it is not possible to learn a programming language or framework and say we already have everything we need to move forward. The language evolves, the framework evolves, and finding out about their use and disuse day to day is key. You always have to be alert to this evolution, always be learning, even if you are not implementing the knowledge. The great challenge is that, living overloaded with information, we fall under the pressure of not knowing everything or not knowing enough, of having to deal with the limitations of technology, and impostor syndrome comes knocking… In these moments you need an impeccable focus and discipline,” she shares.
Although optimistic, the developer acknowledges that it is not always easy: “Because, if you are learning something new, and not implementing it today, will you implement it in the future in your professional journey? I have been through all of this, depression, anxiety, impostor syndrome, but what always gets me out of the pit is my discipline, which I learnt from my parents – discipline, persistence, patience and self-respect (or self-love).”
It is this resilience that motivates Yara. So much so that, besides keeping up with events in the two places where she lives, she is still concerned about the national tech agenda. In terms of references, she trains systematically at the Rocketseat school. As for projects to implement, Polana says there are several she would like to put into practice because she knows they would simplify many local services. “Hospitals are extremely overloaded, and it would be a good experiment to introduce a service that facilitated online video consultations, for non-serious cases, of course. Because with this service, perhaps we could lift the burden from the patient of having to go to an establishment and wait for hours for a consultation of 3 to 5 minutes, when they could have the consultation where they are and be directed to the right hospital service without losing so much time,” the young woman shares, confidently.
