Taking days off work to work on Codality
I took a few days off from work to work on Codality- tooling, marketing, product planning. I haven’t taken an actual full week of vacation, with no meetings, no bug fixes, no “urgent” email responses, since my daughter was born 12 years ago. And of course that wasn’t really time off... birthing an entire human is exhausting.
Most of that time, the lack of time off was because I was a bootstrapping one-woman show. But I’ve found it difficult even after going back to employment these past few years. I have a knack for landing in roles where I’m in a constant state of coordinating multiple complex, high-pressure projects. My obsessive nature keeps me compelled to keep architecting, unblocking, coordinating, resolving conflicts, and even doing hands-on coding that I quite frankly do not have the time for. That mentality is why I’m good in this role, and also why it’s hard for me to step away.
Stress and long hours be damned, I’m still charging ahead to this next chapter of my career. There's no other choice, my cofounders and I are willing this into existence.
#Leadership #CareerJourney #WomenInTech #TechLeadership #WorkLifeBalance
Jessie Grenfell
Jessie has spent 20+ years architecting and delivering software for organizations where complexity is the norm: financial services, insurance, nonprofits, and regulated industries where getting it wrong isn’t an option. She specializes in the hard problems: unique operational workflows, cross-system integrations, and compliance requirements (HIPAA, CCPA, SOC 2) built into the design from the first conversation.
Her AI work comes out of that background. She has shipped AI to production, not just piloted it: a multi-agent research pipeline that cut a client’s investigation time from over an hour to minutes, and natural-language analytics that let executives ask plain-English questions of their operational data and get validated charts back. Years building business critical systems taught her where AI belongs in a business process and where it doesn’t.
At Codality, she leads engagements from discovery through delivery, because she’s seen what happens when that thread gets cut.