I love yoga, cats, writing snail-mail letters and puzzles. I like 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, trying to inspire other women and minorities in STEM 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. Most recently I was very honoured to be a Hardware Track Reviewer for the Grace Hopper Celebration. I am looking forward to making an impact with my various technical, mentorship and organizational qualities.
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, Speakerhub and Innovation Women in hopes to do more like this! Check out my Speaker One Sheet too!
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 pandhere
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!
