Hi 
I’m Maria, university student, self-taught Erlang programmer, occasionally working as a freelancer, generally trying to make the world a better place (through Erlang 
).
My story, well, here goes 
I started toying around with programming as a child (Pascal I think it was) and at high school. At university, I took a superficial, on-and-off round-trip through some of the more popular programming languages of the day, out of curiosity. None of them catched my interest for long, though.
When I finally tripped over Erlang by chance, however, I was hooked. The pragmatic approaches to things, the rather unique features, even the somewhat scary alien syntax: fascinating. The absence of fancy magic that had, to varying degrees, crept into most of the languages I had played with before: pleasing. The things you could do with it, the power: impressive. The ability to frighten lofty IT undergraduates with words like “recursion” and “concurrency”: glee 
Put simply: 
After a period of reading, learning, experimenting, and getting in contact with some other nice Erlangers (@juhlig, @essen, …), I started making small contributions to Ranch, gen_smtp, and some Erlang stdlib modules (queue, maps, proplists). My IMO biggest achievements to date are being Co-Author and -Implementor of EEP 56 and the modernization of the timer module.