I love to keep myself busy; usually I am always doing some sort of volunteer work on the side whether it is teaching computer science to kids, creating some interactive workshop or organizing hackathons. Recently I made an extensive resume guide for new grads.
I also do hardware and IoT projects on the side. My favourite project was rigging up an old rotary phone to call on my cell phone. I have also dabbled in soft robotics, infrared projects, and custom PCB building. Most recently I was very honoured to speak at the Grace Hopper Celebration.
This is a map of all the locations I have spoke at and what I spoke about! Shout out to Courtney Yatteau for creating such a fun, interactive workshop that sparked this. I have made speaker profiles on Sessionize, Conference Connect and Speakerhub in hopes to do more like this! Check out my Speaker One Sheet too!
NYC Resistor has the best classes!! Custom PCBs and making
conductive fabric. So stoked to finally have made my own
custom PCB with so so so so much help from
Alex Tait!! I managed to finally understand the layering and even made
some
pr's to the project!
Also took a fun workshop on how to make conductive fabric from
Katie Anne Mills and
Kari Love! Such an impressive physics lesson from Katie. I thought
they only way to have touchable electronics was to have
electricity complete the circuit. No. There is a fancy physics
formula that shows us the capacitors exponentially-decaying
voltage curve which then by monitoring that we can tell
whether the fabric is being touched.
I have wanted to volunteer for FIRST since I heard about it in 2017. I wanted to be a part of it so bad that I completed a course on how to teach the FIRST tech challenge. Taught by the wonderful Mike Carbonaro. I finally got to be a part of my first robotics competition first as a pit resetter which is by far the coolest job of the whole competition. I got to reset the pit before every competition. This means gathering all the `fuel` (yellow balls) and placing them in the correct areas. Also during the match if any of the balls are sent flying I go to grab them. Most importantly, I get a front row seat to every single match!!! So cool! I also got to judge which was so inspiring. These high school students are so freaking smart. It is so cool! You can see the script I wrote for the Innovation in Control Award (aka the software award) here.
I had a bunch of unused tech and I wanted to make Jewelry. It
was a lot harder than I thought. Keyboard jewelry is easy,
just Dremel a hole. But the ThinkPad charger motherboard was a
whole thing :P I can not stress enough that the motherboard
project is dangerous! A lot of the pieces I was taking apart
were old. Probably some had leaded solder. Having that rest on
your skin, not a good idea. Also motherboards have fiberglass
in them. So when I cut them with aviation snips it wasn't that
bad but when I was buffing the rough edges with a Dremel I
really should have had a better ventilation system and a mask
on. I didn't and nothing bad happened but I want to be able to
keep making these far into my future :P (Also I need to cover
that bracelet in epoxy eventually ™️)
Also if
anyone wants an AI story: When I was starting this project I
was trying to look up the dangers of drilling holes into
motherboards. The ONLY thing AI had to tell me was "Well, if
you drill a hole into a motherboard, it probably won't work
anymore". 🙄 🙄 🙄 🙄 Thank you AI. I never would have
guessed.
I learned a ton of fun things:
Code && Coffee was the first New York City Tech Meetup I went to when I first moved. It feels so cool to be able to speak at one of their events!
I had two sessions accepted at Tech Bash! I got to combine all of my favourite things: Talking about Taylor Swift, speaking at a polyglot conference, and teaching kidlets about computer science! It was such a fun conference and I met a bunch of other robotics nerds!
It has been my dream to speak at the Grace Hopper Celebration since 2017 and I can not believe it happened this year! I am so lucky to go up on that stage with two of my most amazing friends: Helen and Jasmine. Our workshop created lasting memories for us! We got glowing reviews from the students saying they loved how interactive it was. There is even a professor at University of Washington who is going to recreate our workshop! I was so stoked about the whole thing I made custom pins for Helen, Jasmine and I!
It was so so so exciting to speak at such a huge international conference for the first time. I had done smaller conferences or student conferences but this was the first big one where my talk was featured on socials before people registered! They even made me a cute hype video with videos from the Era's Tour!
This was such a fun event to organize! The people that come to these events are so genuine and then on top of that I got to spend making breadboarding workshops. Jasmine Lawrence Campbell suggested some fun parts I had never worked with before like a 555 timer. I got to make a blinking light with no code! It was very fun debugging the photoresistors too.
At work I organize internal lightning talks where people do a quick 10 minute talk on something technical. We had such success with these talks internally that we thought we would try them out externally as well and people loved them! I got to do 10 minutes on how we use Java as well as all the fun new things coming up in Java 25!
I created a workshop called From Concert to Code: The IoT + Hardware Behind Taylor Swift's Dazzling 70K Fan Displays! where I went through how Taylor Swift uses light up bracelets to paint graphics across her crowds during the Era's Tour. It was a lot of fun to breadboard these components because I have never worked with infrared sensors before.
Started up the NYC chapter of Women + TGX (Trans and Gender Expansive) in Robotics! We had a great first event. We had networking while doing a paper circuit workshop. People absolutely loved it and we are going to be having more! Maybe breadboarding workshop next time! Check out our instagram!
Dressed up as a pigeon during an all hands presentation at work for halloween. I was presenting to 600 people about how I started a tech speakers guild where we practice public speaking every month.
The MTA Open Data Challenge launched this year and I was able to submit a fun project! I love being a train nerd in New York City. I made a fun site to illustrate a controversial directional question!
I applied to be a reviewer for the Hardware Track for the Grace Hopper Celebration in 2023 and I got it! It was so cool to be able to review sessions from all around the world, from hardware experts. See me listed with all the volunteers here.
I am an official model for People.com 💁♀️💁♀️ Just kidding hahaha Some times they get "real world" testers and "real world" people to take photos of the products but technically I am getting paid so technically I am a professional model :P See all of my work:
Every year Amii (Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute) hosts a conference for student developers in Edmonton called TechAid. I had the pleasure of joining them to chat about how to contribute to open source, how to rock the review process and then how to highlight all of this on your resume. You can see me listed in the list of speakers!
The Edmonton chapters of Google Developer Group, Women Techmakers and Women in AI Canada created an amazing International Women's Day event. They made a call for participation and my resume workshop made the cut! I was able to speak with students and commiserate about how hard it is to put yourself out there to be rejected and gave them some tips to stand out. There is an awesome video of me presenting as well!
I was so excited to be elected to the board because I have been involved as a member of Dev Edmonton since 2019 and I wanted to be able to give back. I was elected as the secretary which means I am in charge of the meeting minutes and keeping track of our paid members. I have also been taking on other responsibilities such as our newsletter, taking code of conduct training, writing our code of conduct incident response plan, and onboarding various meet up groups like the newly formed Junior Developers meet up group. This is a photo of one of our recent networking events.
When I was a student I didn't really know many types of developers. I knew that I maybe wanted to be a front end or back end developer but I didn't really know what a day in the life of those developers was like. So I created this workshop which has a website and database filled with bugs. We spend 10 minutes pretending to be a different type of developer, we try to find the bug and we solve it together. Now the students will know what a day in the life of a front end developer, back end developer, security engineer, data engineer, and a dev ops engineer are like. GitHub link to see code and tickets here.
We had a Christmas decorating contest at work. To spice up our cubicle I added a 'Fire log'. I hooked up a Raspberry Pi to poll our Jira board. Anytime our team completed a ticket a flame would be added to the real Fire Log. As we completed more tickets our cubicle became more Christmas-y!
I have been trying to give back more during the pandemic. Meeting with students and helping them through interviews, debugging, projects or hackathons has really helped me connect to people during the pandemic. I have been able to meet with students every two weeks to help them through their year and be a mentor at hackathons which is much more fast paced. My favourite opportunity was to mentor for the AI4GoodLab which featured teams of women competing in a hackathon, boot camp and final project demo. The group I mentored was the "PhysiFeedback" group. I was also listed on their "AI experts" page: ai4goodlab.com/ai-experts. They have since changed it, but there is still proof in the internet archive!
I Co-founded YEGWIT in August 2019. YEGWIT aims to build a strong and safe group for women, diverse genders, and allies in tech with the goal of fostering engagement and opportunity, providing mentorship, and creating community. We normally hold brunch event's and have a safe place for people to chat. We have hosted events about being "Brave not Perfect" and mental health during a pandemic.
In response to the pandemic there were a couple Edmonton developers and I who decided to create the first global pandemic hackathon! With the catchy name CODEVID-19 we set out on our way to finding hackers. Within the first week we had over 1600 participants. We had people from all over the world checking in code. We were on TV and the radio too.
At Dotdash Meredith we had an internal hardware hackathon. The challenge was to automate something! There were teams that automated snacks and coffee but our team chose to make meetings a little easier. We made a blinking button that would be placed in the middle of a meeting room. The light would blink various colors to tell you how close you were to the end of your meeting being over. If you pressed the button during the meeting it would also try to book extra time in that meeting room. We had a working prototype in Edmonton and one made by me in New York City!
I was lucky enough to be accepted into the Alberta Women AI Cohort that was put on by Amii. It has been a great 6 months among 35 other passionate women filled with evening classes on AI, meeting inspirational women in AI, networking with developers in Edmonton and making new friends. I have learnt a lot and become more confident as a minority in STEM. It has really been great. I was even invited back in June 2021 as a panelist to talk about the importance of networking and having a strong community of women.
I was so excited when my Dad gave me his old rotary phone to play on. I was determined to connect it to my cell phone so I could use the rotary phone to dial and the cell phone to talk. I managed to solder some wires to the rotary phone which connected into the raspberry pi. From there the raspberry pi would read the signals and send that to a database. I would then have an app on my phone that would poll the database for a phone number. It all worked perfectly! Now I can carry my rotary phone with me anywhere to dial on it :P
These lovely ladies have been a part of my favourite student group. Ada's Team has helped me find a place in University. It has also taken me to more places than I could ever imagine. We try to send students to a conference every year! In my final year I was lucky enough to be voted in as president. I am so lucky. Also this is the old website that I managed, much less pretty but more history :P
This is my robot for CMPUT 412 - Experimental Mobile Robotics. My friend Michele and I were partners though out this class. We did projects related to self driving cars, image recognition, facial recognition, SLAM and more! This is the website we made for the class.
I accepted an Software Engineering internship at Intuit in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada as well as Mountainview, California, USA. I was featured in one of their blogs about the interns they had and what they learned that year. I learned so much about Front End development and also about what kind of company culture I want to work in. They really do treat their employees well.
This was one of my biggest group projects in University! I worked on this project with the friends in another photo on this website. Our assignment for one of our classes is to make an Uber app! We met every Wednesday to code up a storm! Here is our UML of the project: Check it out!
I have been lucky enough to meet these wonderful people at the University of Alberta. We have almost all of our classes together and we have been solving computing problems throughout our undergraduate studies. These are the people that make me smile every day! Left to right: Bennett, Kieter, Mike, Cole, Sarah and myself!
During my second year of computing science I embarked on the task of creating a Lunar Lander game. Lunar Lander was the first video game that accurately modeled physics laws. The game is all about landing a rocket ship on flat ground while it's oriented properly. I programmed this in C. In addition to programming the game I added many cool features such as a fuel bar, catching bonus stars, a color changing success message and it also blew up if you crashed. This was a very fun project and I loved creating it.
Teaching kids science camps through DiscoverE has been a highlight of my undergraduate experience. We teach many camps on many different topics and we also teach all girls camps. We want girls to be more comfortable and interested in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math). During one week of camp we taught the girls how to build and program Lego Mindstorms. The girls were amazing, they made so many innovative robots! They even made a robot that was 4 foot 6 inches and could walk around!
I accepted a part time job at the Mazankowski Alberta Heart Institute in the Servier Virtual Cardiac Centre where I made software that overlays contour lines onto Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Images. I worked to implement the computing of various statistics based on the contours. I even got to present my work at Cardiac Sciences Research Day in Edmonton in 2017.
In 2016 I had the amazing opportunity to be sent to the Canadian Celebration of Women in Computing. This was my first computing conference so I was blow away with the different fields you could go into with computer science and the career paths I could take. They had many presentations to listen to and I found many of my passions in computing science. I know I want to do more work with kids; teaching them to code is so rewarding. I went to this conference again in 2017 and that year I also was one of the organizers. I organized a lightning talk for one of the conference tracks. I had student applicants send in proposals about things they were working on in tech and afterwards there were judges to give to the best presentation.
Rubber Duck Debuggers is the team name my friend Michael and I use for when we do programming contests. We have only done local contests but they are always a lot of fun. There is a programming club that meets every Friday which we try to attend regularly! YES, we do carry our rubber ducks around with us EVERYWHERE. Go Rubber Duck Debuggers!
I am obsessed with rats. Which means my instagram algorithm always shows me rats, and pigeons are just so close to rats so my instagram always shows me that as well. One day it showed me an article about how The High Line was putting on a Pigeon Fest with a Pigeon Impersonation Pageant for National Pigeon Day right next to their 17 foot pigeon sculpture! Hundreds of people applied and my idea for an acrobatics performance got picked as top 7!!! I could not believe it. My name is on the High lines website! Once we were picked it was a packed month of making costumes, doing radio interviews, rehearsing, making our own music, recording our own coo's, constructing our own stand for the pizza, copy submitted for the site and so so so much more. After all was done we were featured in: The New York Times, People Magazine, Seth Myers, WFUV radio, The Daily Mail, nyclovesnyc, Mickmicknyc, Mickmicknyc, Secret_nyc, The High Line, TheMeganDaily, USA today, Time Out, and Time Out New York . You can watch the rehearsals and performance on our instagram!
