Lyndsey Scott is not just a model, she’s a supermodel and has worked for Prada, Gucci and the Victoria’s Secret Show. But what many people don’t know about her is that when she’s not modelling Lyndsey is a girl who likes to do something that is very uncommon for a model.
She codes and helps others who are learning to code. Having studied computer science alongside theatre studies at university, she went against her parents’ advice and took to the runway after college, getting her first big break in fashion at the age of 24. But Lyndsey wasn’t just modelling. While travelling the world for huge fashion houses like Prada and Louis Vuitton, she also developed seven apps for the iPhone on the side, two of which have since been taken on by Apple.
Although Lyndsey likes to keep quiet about her programming life, she has become a bit of a celebrity on Stack Overflow, a website that programmers use to quickly answer coding questions (to date, she’s gained over 1,000 reputation points and her profile has been viewed over 38,000 times). She said she was using the website for so long herself that she felt like it was time she gave something back to the community. She began answering questions from other users and inadvertently built her reputation as a computer programmer while doing so. She has also managed to combine her two industries – fashion and technology – by creating an app whereby models upload their portfolios onto an iPad to be used at castings.
“I built that app because it was something I personally needed. My book always ends up looking terrible, the books fall apart, the pages are tearing, it’s dirty and it’s a mess.”
Lyndsey is interested in getting more women into tech.
Lyndsey has recently spoken out about the controversy surrounding the lack of women getting into tech. As a woman who has not only enjoyed learning different programming languages but has also developed and sold her own apps, she believes that giving girls the opportunity to get interested at an early age is the key.
She said “I know I personally became interested in programming when I was 13 or younger as soon as I realized I had a TI-89 calculator capable of being programmed and a book full of documentation. I think, in general, many young people would love to better understand what goes into making the technology they use on a regular basis, but too few of them are given the opportunity.”
Want to learn to code like Lyndsey? Check out Career Foundry’s Web Development course.
