Filipa Mendonça-Vieira
Perfect and upright, eschews evil.
By trade, I tell computers what to do. I make apps, I build products, I throw events. I think about people, urbanism, housing, the internet, and living a good life. I live in Toronto.
- Subscribe to my writing via the rss feed.
- You can find me on mastodon, and on instagram.
- Reach me by email via filipamv at okayfail dot com.
-
What Do We Do When We Read The Code?
August 11, 2026
The way we write code is changing. How do we retain control over the integrity of the things we build?
-
The Roles We Play
February 8, 2026
A meditation on the shifting expectations society places on us, how our identity is a negotiation with our environment, and how our ideas of the world shape our reality.
-
My Year of Raves
March 24, 2025
In my third year of being trans, I discovered that I like dancing. This was a surprise. Dancing is meditative, therapeutic – healing even. Now I try to go dancing as often as I can. This the story of how I learned I love to dance.
-
British Columbia is YIMBYer than California
November 17, 2021
Comparing new dwelling building permits per capita per year between select U.S. states and select Canadian provinces
-
Diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, polio, and Haemophilus influenza
October 30, 2021
The moment had arrived, the needle was ready.
-
Actually, Rent Control Is Great
November 13, 2017
An op-ed summary of my paper on why rent control is good, which was published in the Toronto Star. TL;DR: rent control gives tenants security of tenure — which should be seen as a right of tenants as well as homeowners.
-
The Saints of Little Portugal
July 19, 2017
When you next walk through the residential streets of Toronto's west end, take a look at the houses around you. Before long, you'll see the azulejos.
-
Canada, Keep the Queen!
March 18, 2017
Let's talk about the Queen, shall we? Elizabeth Alexandra Mary has been the Queen of Canada and fourteen other countries since 1952. She is now ninety years old, and she's not getting any younger.
4. Selected Work and Projects
From 2015 to late 2017, I was a cofounder of Appcanary. We tracked security vulnerabilities in open source code and notified our customers when they had to take action.
We got into Y Combinator, we raised money, we built a product, we built a small team, we got customers, we wrote content marketing and published a podcast, we monitored hundreds of servers and thousands of apps. Alas, the market wasn't quite what we thought it was, and we ended up being acquired by GitHub.
It was an interesting time! You can find out more via our company blog.
xvzf
Established in 2014, with a few co-conspirators, I organize and throw a regularly occurring storytelling night for Toronto tech workers. We produce a podcast, and a whole bunch of people show up. You should check it out.
Until early 2015, I was a cofounder of State Machinery, a security and development consultancy. We opened for business in November, 2012. We performed security audits, penetration tests, built mvps and advised teams on how to improve their software practice.
Gemcanary
In February 2013, we built Gemcanary, a tool for monitoring known security disclosures in Rails/Bundler enabled applications on Github. I wrote a little bit more about it on the State Machinery blog. It eventually led to Appcanary.
Audiogram
Back in January 2012, I created an app for an dance party art installation. I combined the instagram api with some javascript and it was a lot of fun.
NYTimes Timelapse
In July 2011, I put together an eight month time lapse of the front page of the nytimes.com. I wrote a time lapse tutorial, and I also happened to capture the front page of the bbc. It got a lot of attention, and it was pretty neat.
Undergraduate thesis
In lieu of course work, prior to graduating I wrote an undergraduate thesis on applying a naïve bayesian classifier to rss feeds.