What was it like breaking barriers as the first female engineer at Blizzard Entertainment during the peak of World of Warcraft?

When I joined Blizzard Entertainment, they had never employed a female engineer. However, because I had grown up playing tabletop role-playing games and video games with guys in the backs of hobby shops, being the only woman on the engineering floor did not feel foreign to me. The engineers welcomed me as a peer because we were all facing the same digital dragons together. We worked grueling schedules, often sleeping under our desks in cots while builds compiled, but we were united by a player-first philosophy. We were given total creative latitude by executives like Mike Morhaime to build systems that prioritized fun and community above all else.