“I usually say that I’m a hybrid,” Ana Jiménez says. In this context what does that even mean, what is a hybrid? According to the Oxford Language Dictionary, a hybrid is “a word formed from elements taken from different languages, for example television ( tele- from Greek, vision from Latin).” If we use that as our definition, Ana Jiménez Santamaria has a good reason to call herself a hybrid; she can speak the language of the business world as well as that of the developer domain.

Ana holds a master’s degree in data science and a bachelor’s degree in marketing. Her journey to open source began at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Móstoles (MO’-stoeles), Spain on the southwest outskirts of Madrid. In 2017 she spent a year at the University of California, Riverside studying consumer behavior before returning home to Móstoles to get her Bachelor’s Degree in Marketing and Master’s Degree in Data Science.

When it comes to getting visibility for their work, most engineers working on open-source projects aren’t thinking about the science of human behavior or marketing. They want to address a problem, apply their knowledge to create the technology, and create something useful for themselves. Ana understands that because it was something she did at the beginning of her career.