We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Del Yarisantos. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Del below.

Del, appreciate you joining us today. Can you share a story that illustrates an important or relevant lesson you learned in school?

So DevMoms was created to be my capstone in grad school and an opportunity had come to where I could apply my DevMom business plan. Since my capstone semester was a couple of months ahead, I thought why not try it now and I can refine my writing later. Two birds one stone! And I was able to with execute with my awesome Co-Founder on our first operation plan with our customer! We went through planning, ideation, and then implementation. Luckily this customer brought us more customers. Where I could test and prove some of the processes.

When it came to my last semester and meeting with my professor, my capstone proposal was rejected because it wasn’t an implementation of an enterprise software …. I was absolutely disheartened but I realized that i had forecasted way too early and I did’t get to know my stakeholder lol. So my biggest lesson in grad other than stopping the negative self-talk – know your audience, be in the “now” and don’t plan thinking you are in the “future”.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers?

I am first generation immigrant. My family got their citizenship through my dads service in the US Navy. Growing up my family was use to making alot of sacrifices to make a better tomorrow. For example, My parents separated for over 4 years so that my mom could get her bachelors in nursing school in the Philippines and it was what my dad could afford. One of my best memory when my parents explained why they did it or why my dad had to travel so much for work- because they believed that the hardship will only be a moment and it was to prepare for something greater. I did grow up moving around a lot. When my dad retired from the Navy, we moved to Utah when I was 16. Just like any other place we moved to, we experienced culture shock and some kind of form of prejudice – and we experienced it internally as in within our own communities and also outside of our communities. Due to that, we didn’t speak out alot but I loved that my parents taught me that it is my choice to be kind or not. With all of those things being said, after high school I got recruited to join the University of Utah Army ROTC program and found myself in the Utah national Guard for a couple of years. After the guard, I went through a divorce, completed my undergrad, remarried and spent about 6 years in the Food manufacturing industry. Then went through a 2nd divorce, landed my first tech job with a blockchain company that taught me I could code and deploy mvp’s, started grad school and bought my first place on my own. Then the pandemic came was let go , found tech-moms program and…. so many amazing things had happened. After Tech-Moms I got a full ride scholarship to a coding bootcamp , went to compete in a couple of Hackathons and won a couple ,…. and because of those elating experience – I wanted to give back to a community of women who have a trailblaze a path for women like me who are a bit lost, feeling undervalued but hungry to survive. As someone who has faced prejudice due to the color skin of my skin, my gender, upbringing not being normal, not being in the same social groups or religion – I don’t ever want to be someone who discourages another person that they can’t do what what they want to do… And quite frankly a lot of the things that I’ve done thus far…..is most likely because someone told me I couldn’t do it….And I love this quote from Ruth Ginsburg “Fight for the things that you care bout, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you”. This is why I Co-Founded DevMoms with Ally Nickell – so we can be the change we want to see in the Tech Industry in Utah. DevMoms is a place for women who have put in the work to either get the training, education or is a Tech-Mom grad but needs a project to build their confidence in their skills through website contract work with Small Business owners who need a cost effective solution. DevMoms was launched in December of 2021 and since then we have: created a self pace learning program where the women are taught the software development life cycle, Agile project Management, UI/UX and web development either through a code or a web builder. Thus far we’ve had over 10 paying customers who wanted to work with a diverse workforce for the purpose of inclusivity. It has been a fantastic journey so far and now DevMoms is in the process of creating a mentorship program so women can get experience in leading teams.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

So for the last 10 years I felt like I’ve just been in survival mode. Backstory – single mom life lol. And what I had to unlearn was I don’t have to accept every opportunity presented to me and it was okay for me to say no so that I could let other things grow.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

I think grad school. It took me about 2 years – I went through a lay off, pandemic, homeschooling kids, trying to do school, coding bootcamp, internships , domestic violence (the system is not kind to those who finally decide to file) , started devmoms, took a social media break to focus on my last two semesters and started DevMoms and now I’m done with grads school. What has really helped me become resilient was self-love. I’ve learned that discipline and consistency is great but self-love brings out more energy when I’m exhausted, feeling lost, and helps me overcome my insecurities.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.delyari.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/devmoms_devshop/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liza-del-yarisantos/
• Other: www.devmoms.com

Image Credits
Frickel Photography – graduation picture