Meet Leonika Boedioetomo, a kick-ass female developer from Indonesia who started Reblood

Women are underrepresented in Indonesia’s IT space for various reasons. There’s a prevailing stereotype that IT jobs are a more suitable for men. However, some female tech pioneers are coming forward these days. In this series, Tech in Asia talks to young women who have decided to make coding a career.

Leonika Sari Njoto Boedioetomo, founder of Reblood

Leonika Sari Njoto Boedioetomo is a developer and the founder of Reblood, an app that encourages people to donate blood. Her startup is currently part of the Start Surabaya incubation program. She’s also active in the FemaleDev community in Indonesia, a program that connects Indonesian women who work in IT.

At the same time, Boedioetomo is still in university, majoring in information systems at the Institute of Technology Sepuluh Nopember (ITS) in Surabaya. Last year, she was one of 47 students chosen to participate in an entrepreneurship bootcamp program at MIT – selected from more than 50,000 applicants.

Q&A

TIA: How did you first get into programming?

Boedioetomo: It was during my first semester at university. I chose information systems as my major, which needs serious programming skills. But my skills were awful back then. In my first semester I got a C for the introductory course.

But there is something interesting about programming. It’s like solving a puzzle. It sparks a curiosity that makes you stay awake at night to make the code run well. That’s why I studied day and night, looking at the same black and white screen, typing every character to make sure there were no errors.

Thankfully, I then got an A in the more advanced course during my second semester.

What was the path that led you to create Reblood?

In 2013, I joined Redblood Indonesia in order to solve e-health problems, specifically blood donation, using the power of IT. We were developing a blood supply chain system for hospitals and blood banks. Unfortunately, the project is now in hibernation, due to incompatibility with the current blood supply chain system. Besides, the real problem in blood distribution is that there are not enough donations.

The project was then reborn as “Reblood,” the idea I brought back home after getting invited by MIT. The team has been developing the application since October last year, and we launched on May 24 this year.

Reblood encourages the user to donate blood routinely. This is the kind of behavior we want to create. In the app, we combine the theory of altruism with gamification techniques to create an interesting user experience.