“I threw a boomerang a few years ago. I now live in constant fear.”

Ok, so I’ve never thrown a boomerang but I have thrown a basketball.

So wonderful to meet you! My name is Tonya and I’m one of your new Python Developer Advocates here at Vonage.

As you probably already gathered, I love to connect with people in an easy-going way and look forward to continuing building the Python community.

My Python developer journey started several years ago after dabbling with a few other languages. I stuck with Python for a handful of reasons but the main one is the community is super amazing!

My first brush with technology came when I was a kid. My parents came home one day with a computer. That was back when computers were the size of elephants! It came with a manual that taught kids how to code, so I jumped right in and wrote my first program.

It would be many years until I wrote another line of code because academics and sports took priority.

I started playing basketball competitively at 5 years old, so most of my life was centered around school and sports which allowed me to learn that teamwork makes the dream work. It never dawned on me until I was a teenager that I’d actually be a student-athlete in college or play professionally, but it happened.

In college, I played basketball at the University of Wisconsin, and played professionally overseas in Europe and the WNBA. It’s been one of the highlights of my whole life as it allowed me to travel the world at a young age and meet so many amazing people.

I’m super excited to be part of the Vonage team and love that I’ll have the chance to spread the joy of where technology and sports intersect.

I’d love to connect with you further, so feel free to drop me a message on Twitter.