Because You Are Excellent: Princess on Confidence, Community, and Building a Career in Tech

There’s a line Princess drops near the end of our conversation that reframes everything that came before it. A mentor once told her, she says, that you don’t do good work in order to become excellent; you do it because you already are. “Because you are excellent, you come to work on time. Because you are excellent, you put in extra effort. Because you are excellent, you get work done on time.”

It lands like a small thesis statement for her whole journey. Because the version of Princess sitting across from me now, a software engineer at Bloomberg, comfortable across the stack, generous about lifting others up, is the same person who once spent an internship “arguing with my manager over what a for loop is.”

How you get from one to the other is the story worth telling.

A Day in the Life: Stand-ups, Web Tech, and Community

When I asked what her day-to-day actually looks like, Princess kept it refreshingly honest: “my day starts whenever I wake up. Um, that kind of depends.” It’s a hybrid role, so some days are in the office and some aren’t, and the office days, she admits, are “a bit more interesting.”

After stand-up, it’s heads-down on web technologies, “work, work, work until evening,” with a sprinkle of Scrum meetings throughout. But what stood out to me was how naturally community threaded into her schedule. Alongside the engineering work, there are sometimes “the Black community, women, women in tech community” meetings. Even on a workday, the people around her aren’t an afterthought, a theme that, as you’ll see, runs deep.

On whether all that Agile ceremony actually works, she was thoughtful rather than dogmatic. Stand-up earns its keep, she says, because “you kind of get a feel for what everyone else is working on.” Someone gives a high-level overview of a part of the codebase you need, and suddenly your own ticket gets easier. It helps her “context switch a lot easier than if everybody is just siloed and working on their own.”

Learn Everything, Touch Everything

Readers who’ve ever clung to one corner of the stack will recognize the next part. Princess came in preferring frontend, “I find it much more intuitive,” and told her manager she just wanted frontend tickets for now. Her manager had other ideas.

“My manager is very big on learn everything, get your hands on everything,” she says. First he nudged her toward backend tickets. Once she got comfortable there: “okay, let’s start looking into infrastructure.” She’s grateful for the push. She may not be “perfect at everything,” but she now has a working understanding of most of what her team does, enough to explain it, even if, she laughs, “some of it may be wrong.”

Her takeaway is one I wish I’d internalized earlier: “having context across the board makes you a better engineer in what you want to specialize in because you understand better what’s feeding into what you’re working on.”

So where does she land on the eternal frontend-vs-backend debate? Diplomatically, and persuasively. They’re “equally challenging,” she argues, because frontend is no longer just writing code. You need an eye for mobile responsiveness, for how a design behaves across “Vision Pro and folding smartphones and all these things.” Frontend “as a concept has changed and grown so much more” than the easy reputation it carries. Backend has its own depth: APIs, infrastructure, talking to different systems. Her verdict, with a grin: “I just prefer frontend though… but it doesn’t mean that… as a concept it is easier.”

Rewind: The Girl Who Didn’t Feel “Smart Enough”

Here’s where I wanted to slow down, because Princess doesn’t have a computer science degree, and yet here she is. So how did she get here?

The honest version: it’s not that she had no background, but that she studied Management Information Systems rather than CS, “a combination of computer science and business.” She’d actually entered university as a business major, considered switching to computer science, and then talked herself out of it. The reason is one she names plainly and more than once: “I didn’t feel like I was smart enough.”

MIS felt like a safe middle ground, somewhere she could “run back to where I’m comfortable.” But a funny thing happened: she found herself enjoying the CS classes more and more, and self-studying through the pandemic to go deeper than the coursework went.

The turning point came as an unlikely accident. Working as a marketing intern, she got caught by the CEO “building programs during company time, which is not good.” Instead of a reprimand, she got an opportunity: the company needed a system, and would she like to try? She said sure, partly, she jokes, “because I didn’t have a choice. He has caught me.” Ten weeks later she’d built something (an Excel-based tool, she’s quick to clarify) that, “apparently they still use it today.” More importantly, that CEO “helped me to build that confidence in myself.”

Goldman Sachs, a For Loop, and a Rejection She’s Grateful For

Confidence, it turns out, isn’t a switch you flip once. Back at school (Ashesi), she picked up more CS courses and landed an internship at Goldman Sachs. And then the old fear came roaring back. “I am so afraid to touch anything that I’m always asking for help with everything, even the things I know.” Hence the now-legendary moment: “arguing with my manager over what a for loop is.”

No return offer. At the time, devastating. In hindsight, “I’m really grateful that I didn’t.” Her manager was honest with her: she had potential, but “there’s still a lot more work that needs to be done.” That honesty, plus a kind of liberating recklessness (“right now they have rejected me, I have nothing to lose”), set the tone for what came next.

For her final year, she swapped a thesis (sold to her as “the easiest way to get an A,” a claim she later debunked) for an applied project: a computer-assisted career guidance system “using React and AI.” When I teased that the AI was probably “a huge chain of if-else statements,” she didn’t miss a beat: “That was basically it.” Janky code or not, it taught her to think “programmatically, thinking logically.”

My favorite detail in this whole stretch is about a lecturer. In third year, she built a UI from scratch and presented it, only to be told, not in so many words, that it was “so nasty,” let’s move on. By her final-year presentation, the same lecturer marveled: “oh wow, this UI is so beautiful. Wow. I really like the colors.” Her internal reply was perfect: “Yes, you will like it.”

The LeetCode Subscription and the Power of Just Asking

The job hunt was brutal. She LeetCoded “hard,” slept at 4 AM, sent her CV everywhere, and collected “so, so, so, so, so many rejections.” One company strung her through multiple stages before discovering she was at a Ghanaian university and couldn’t provide visa sponsorship: “all just went down the drain.”

But two moments of community changed the math. First, the developer-in-Vogue Ivy Barly ran a giveaway for a year of LeetCode Premium. Princess wanted it badly and was wishing out loud in her best friend’s DMs, when her friend said the thing that became a pattern in Princess’s life: “why don’t you just go and ask? Like, the worst she can say is no.” She asked. She got it.

Second, when her current company emailed her, she nearly dismissed it as a scam (“the font was weird”) before reasoning, with that same shameless courage, “I’m a student, I have 20 Cedis in my account. If you want to scam me, it’s not me that you’re going to get it.” Three interviews later, including a system design round she prepped for with help from friends, she made it.

She’s emphatic about why community mattered: it was her best friend who pushed her to ask Ivy, her uni friends who prepped her, “my friends who were with me when I wanted to give up.” As she puts it, “community is such an important part of becoming a better software engineer.”

Lifting Others Up, Even While Still Climbing

What struck me most is that Princess was helping other people land international offers while still struggling to get her own. It started when she helped a friend get into a summer program in Madrid; he insisted she turn it into a business and even paid her. That became Uplink Masterclass, co-founded with a collaborator, taking on a small group of students each month.

The philosophy was telling. The goal “was very much to help you so that you could do the application by yourself,” not to do it for them. And it was deliberately affordable, payment plans included, because “we wanted people to be able to afford it.” Plenty of their students went on to “really big names.” Months ago, she still hears from a former student thanking her. Would she start it again? “Maybe eventually,” but life is full right now.

When I pointed out the vulnerability running through her whole story, the repeated bouts of fear and self-doubt that few people in her position admit, she didn’t flinch. From the outside, you’d assume she has “everything figured out.” The truth is more human, and more useful to the rest of us.

Outside the Code

Lest this read like a person who only works, I pushed her on hobbies, and got a delightfully self-aware “I need to get a life.” For the record: she plays guitar “a little bit, just small,” bakes, watches movies, travels and sightsees locally, sings in the church choir, and takes long walks, “a 2-hour walk just for Fun.” On Ghanaian food, she confesses she’s “quite lazy” about cooking it these days, opting instead for a good Ghanaian restaurant “when I’m feeling very homesick."

"Write the Vision, Make It Plain”

I asked what she’d say to people, especially women, who, like her younger self, assume they’re not “smart enough” for this field. Her answer was the emotional center of the whole conversation.

She names something she’s observed in many of us from African backgrounds: “an internal kind of like subservience” that quietly limits what we believe we can achieve. Her antidote is to aim high and aim concretely. “If you’re looking to hit the sky, you need to have the sky in view.” Her own school-era goal wasn’t grades; it was to travel the world for free on a company’s dime, a goal she actually hit.

Drawing on her faith, she points to Hosea: “write the vision, make it plain, that he who sees it will run by it.” Decide what you want, whether Microsoft, Google, or the best engineer in the room, write it down, then break it into the steps that get you there. And above all: “Don’t let yourself talk you out of being all that you can possibly be.”

I’ll be honest: I came away from this one genuinely empowered, and I suspect a lot of people reading will too. Princess’s story isn’t a clean highlight reel; it’s fear and rejection and 4 AM nights, threaded through with people who refused to let her quit, and a stubborn willingness to just ask. That’s exactly the kind of “it’s possible” proof this show exists to surface.

Huge thanks to Princess for sharing her journey so openly. You can see the full conversation, including the for-loop saga and the lecturer redemption arc, in the video above.