She pulled herself from addiction by learning to code. Now she’s leading a worker uprising at Apple.

She got pregnant at 21, and the decision to have the baby forced her to clean up her act, she says. In 2007, she was pregnant and living in Kirkland, Wash., when she noticed an ad for a web developer position at Luxuryrealestate.com in Seattle. Scarlett had taught herself how to code and dabbled in web development on an early blogging platform called LiveJournal, she says. She could only afford a dial-up connection, so she built the journals and other websites from scratch with more efficient code, instead of using slow, balky programs like Adobe Flash.