Bio
Before becoming a programmer, Veronica was a researcher with an eye for process improvement. (She helped pick the Mars Curiosity Rover’s landing site!) After teaching herself web development, she continues to bring a researcher’s perspective from her time at NASA-JPL & MIT into whatever she is learning. She loves exploring the web and teaching, and has spoken at Git Merge Belgium, PyCaribbean, PyCon CZ, and PyCon AU on building the tooling & docs that people need. When she isn’t speaking about how the web can be better for developers, she enjoys nerding out about documentation, as well as crushing rocks and making them tell her their secrets. In her younger days, she was bestowed the title of “Most Awkward Girl in the Universe”. She wears it with pride.
Past speaking experience:
Technical presentations
- “To comment or not to comment? Conflicting attitudes towards commenting and beginner pain” (this talk), Flatiron NYC (March, 2019)
- “Git ‘Hooked’ on images in your version control and up your documentation game”, Git Merge (Belgium, Feb. 2019), PyTennessee (Feb. 2019), PyCaribbean (Feb. 2019)
- Workshop on “Git ‘Hooked’ on images in your version control and up your documentation”, Flatiron NYC (Jan. 2019)
- “Imagining Colors is Hard: Representing Visual Changes in Version Control”, Hacktoberfest NYC 2018 slides
- Assisted in teaching “Lights Camera Action! Scrape, explore, and model to predict Oscar winners & box office hits” tutorial at PyCon 2018 description bio video materials
- “Using Unix to make your time in the terminal better” at NYC Women’s Work Jelly 2017 project page
- Assisted in teaching “Python for Data Science” tutorial at Boston Code Camp 27 (2016) description materials
- “Giving Imposter Syndrome the Kick in the Pants It Deserves” at NYC Women’s Work Jelly 2016 slides
- Workshop “LaTeX: Academic Typesetting for Industry” at Recurse Center 2015 materials
Teaching experience
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SAT Writing Instructor for MIT Academic Teaching Initiative 2011-2012 Developed & taught 12-week SAT Writing course • Median 50% showed a 200 point increase during the course • A few students even contacted me as they were writing college entrance essays
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Programming Coach for Bootstrap Afterschool Program 2011-2012 Provided 1-on-1 and group instruction for 14 middle-school students in creating their own games • Used functional programming (Scheme) and pair programming to teach algebraic concepts (Pythagorean theorem & writing appropriate algebraic functions) and programming concepts (problem solving using the Design Recipe, data types, Boolean logic, conditional branching, functions & variables)
Research-related presentations/communication
- Presented findings of safety tests of malfunctioning equipment to lab at MIT Paleomagnetism Laboratory 2012
- Presented findings to internal committee / communicated intern project needs to software developer at NASA JPL 2009 • Led student effort to find rock distributions of landing sites for Curiosity rover • Introduced three students to in-house software for QA element of our project, including reporting procedures, and software process and limitations