Sophia Willows is a software engineering leader from New Zealand with deep experience across startups, lifelong learning, and community building who inspires the tech industry. Strong in both backend and frontend development and passionate about AI and EdTech, Sophia is dedicated to using technology for good and helping others up.
Sophia has been contributing to software development throughout her career and got good at building scalable solutions. She is the Head of Engineering at Rye, where she heads the development of high-volume commerce APIs that process hundreds of thousands of transactions a month. She previously worked on building EdTech platforms that are used by students around the world.
However, Sophia is also a talented blogger who uses her platform to share her views on AI, API design, databases, and engineering leadership. She believes in the power of sharing knowledge and the power of community within the tech sector, and her passion for public education shows that. Thousands of tech professionals around the globe visit her blog, Sophiabits, every month to learn from her.
Mastering blog content and sharing unique perspectives
What sets Sophia’s blog apart is that she combines the hands-on experience with thoughtful insights from her leadership journey. “Whenever I solve a problem at work or help a junior engineer, I often think, ‘this could make a great blog post,’” she explains. Her posts don’t repeat what everyone else says, instead she tries to bring new perspectives and real value to the internet, avoiding adding to the noise.
A standout post centers on hiring strategies and whether slashing headcount is really the way to decrease risk. However, Sophia counters that hiring takes time, and if you get it wrong, it may be a long time before you get it right. Just as she noted, “I’ve seen organizations waste enormous resources because they are relying too heavily on ‘just-in-time’ hiring.”
Charting the path for green software engineering
Sophia is a dedicated advocate for sustainable technology and seeing the future of green software engineering all whilst providing actionable steps to reduce our environmental impact. “We’ve become accustomed to dismissing performance in the belief that more hardware will be able to fix our problems.” Yet scaling systems in this way is catastrophic for the planet, she warns.
Sophia offers two practical recommendations for engineers looking to implement greener practices:
- Cloud region usage assessment and optimization
- At non-working hours, to turn off staging environments.
The immediate payoffs from these simple actions make teams willing to tackle more advanced sustainability work. But she stresses that lasting change must be mental. Carbon efficiency must be a first-order concern for teams, and adopting greener practices often leads to simpler, more maintainable architecture. “Strong fundamentals and deep problem-solving are key to building efficient systems,” Sophia advises.
Leadership lessons forged through experience
When Sophia reflects on her leadership journey, she emphasizes emotional intelligence and personal engagement. “Over time, I’ve realized how important it is for me to self-regulate because I know how my emotional state can affect my team,” she says. But she also stresses that it’s critical for a leader to demonstrate an honest and deep interest in the job itself.
She explains that if you aren’t committed to the product you’re building, ‘It’s hard to lead a team.’ And at some point, you should have to advocate for your team or defend your product. It becomes nearly impossible to do without real commitment to the mission.” If it is really new, her experience shows that true success in leadership is a function of authenticity and emotional awareness.
Advocating for open learning
Sophia embraces the philosophy of “learning in public,” a mindset that has profoundly shaped her career. She taught a competitive programming bootcamp early on and was just a step ahead of her students. She changed her perspective from this experience. “I came to understand that many of the mentors I admired were only slightly more knowledgeable than I was,” she reflects.
Sophia hopes by openly sharing her learning process will make technical growth less intimidating and especially for people from underrepresented backgrounds. She documents new concepts she comes across on her blog in a transparent way of her learning journey. With humility in mentorship, she says, it’s a disservice to future engineers if we act like expertise comes effortlessly.
Communicating green practices
In her writing on green software practices, Sophia questions the idea that digital solutions are automatically green. She emphasizes that the environmental impact of software systems can differ radically depending on design decisions. “Well-optimized systems can have a vastly lower carbon footprint compared to poorly planned ones operating at the same scale,” she points out.
Furthermore, Sophia compares software optimization to other environmental efforts, such as converting to electric vehicles. Of course, most people don’t have the money to go out and buy a new car on a whim, but everyone wins when engineers make software more efficient. She explains that because those improvements are software based, they’re available immediately in the next app update to users.
In an economy where businesses look at cost saving strategies, Sophia sees a very unique opportunity to promote carbon efficient practices. “Those of us in tech have a civic responsibility to leverage this moment for maximum environmental impact,” she urges.
The transformative power of blogging
Sophia attributes her blogging journey to fine tuning her technical and leadership skills. “Writing forces you to confront inconsistencies in your thinking and refine your ideas,” she observes, noting how the process enhances decision-making and problem-solving abilities.
She also believes that blogging has strengthened her leadership style in communication. “You can’t make a team motivated, but inspiring one requires clear and effective communication,” she explains. Sophia drafts design documents and proposals, and is a big fan of written communications, and attributes this to all the practice she’s picked up writing on her blog.
Insights from reader interactions
She’s also built her professional network through Sophia’s blog, which brings in people from beyond what is in her immediate circle. “The feedback I get from readers—especially those working in fields like MedTech—has been incredibly valuable,” she shares. She has learned from professionals confronting different challenges of internal documentation and knowledge transfer and has molded her way of problem solving around the same.
Sophia is still refining her thinking that way, interacting with readers from different industries. Her understanding of complex engineering challenges is enriched in part by these exchanges, which balance technical constraints with real world requirements.
Evolving role and exciting new frontiers
Looking ahead, Sophia hopes to increase the magnitude of her thought leadership influence through new mediums, such as podcasting. However, blogging will always be at the heart of her work, thanks to her love of writing. “At the end of the day, I just want to keep improving and sharing the things I learn,” she says, underscoring her commitment to continuous growth.
GraphQL is one of her upcoming areas of focus, and she is really excited about it because it is a steep learning curve. Sophia has used GraphQL extensively at Rye and Crimson Education and intends to write a series of posts on best practices. She says she has several essays in the works and is excited to share them.
Sophia is a thought leader in tech through her blog, her leadership philosophy, and her advocacy for sustainable practices. Her story is a great example of what knowledge sharing, empathy and lifelong learning can do to technology’s future for the better.
