Becoming Chief Technology Officer Wasn't a Promotion, It Was a Response
Content Warning: Burnout and other mental health struggles.
CTO building human, trustworthy products
CTO who builds products, helps teams decide what to automate, and cares about effective, trustworthy, human-centered technology.
Latest posts
How Objective-C Made Me a Versatile Software Engineer
Special thanks to the incomparable Sylwia Vargas for helping me structure and focus this post better, as well as to Uli for making kind corrections.
Asking for Help Effectively as a Software Developer
Let's face it, getting stuck on a programming problem stinks , doesn't it?
My experience speaking at DevRelCon 2021
What a year! In 2021, when I started my first role in DevRel I also spoke at this year's edition of DevRelCon .
Pre-recording conference talks
Most of the conference talks I've given this year have not only been online, but also pre-recorded.
My first few months as a developer advocate
I have spent the last 10+ years freelancing and contracting as a software developer. This January, that changed when I became a developer advocate at CodeSee .
Hosting a Podcast from Scratch
A few months ago, Timea and I started hosting the Gender Equality over Coffee podcast, as part of the Women Techmakers Vienna organisation. It's been a blast!
How we did audio/video for our online conference
This year's Women Techmakers Vienna conference was meant to take place in March 2020, but had to be postponed. After three months of monitoring the possibility of holding it later, we as a team decided to hold it online.
Running GUI Linux applications in WSL 2
I've been really enjoying my time using the Windows Subsystem for Linux, or WSL for short. With it, I've been able to develop web software on Windows with the Linux environment familiar to me.
Granting user read/write permissions to a USB device in Ubuntu Linux on boot
One of my recent projects involved having a cash register print receipts to a thermal printer. In order to do this, we had a Sinatra server running on boot on the device that would, upon receiving a POST request, print out the ESC/POS data.
Running a learn together coding group remotely
Our coding study group Study Jams needed a place online where folks could come together remotely, share and learn together, as we've done in person for a number of years. Here's the story of how we managed to make it work!
5 things I learned from a major React Native upgrade
One of my recent gigs was bringing out an update to a React Native app. This involved getting it ready for newer versions of iOS and their recent requirements on the app store , as well as Android's 64-bit app requirement . It looked pretty clear like the update would involve updating the react-native dependency. Specifically, updating to version 0.59 at least would be necessary. Thing is, the…
How we made our Rails test suite about 75% faster
One of my recent tasks has been to take the current test suite for a large-ish Rails app and speed it up as much as possible. This is the story of how I managed to do so without compromising the integrity of the tests.
Updating data across multiple browser tabs using Vue.js and Vuex
What a start to the year! Let me set the stage: I'm in the process of building a cash register / point of sale system, which uses Vue.js and Vuex .
Just go for it: The story of dance-mat.js
This is the story of my first proper hardware project. Before Just Dance , before Beat Saber , one of my favourite music games growing up was Dance Dance Revolution . Let's look into how Birgit and I built our very own Dance Dance Revolution Controller, from scratch! All the code is available on Github .
Breathing Life into the Panoptikum Facebook Messenger Bot with Elixir and Phoenix
While attending the super-fun Vienna BEAMers study group, where we learn all things Elixir and Erlang, I've been making tiny contributions to the Panoptikum project, which creates a podcast-oriented social network. It's been a great opportunity to contribute to a project at the same time as learning a completely new language.
YAML subtlety with saving strings
Ok, so this one had me stuck for ages, and I thought I’d share what went wrong. I was trying to save strings into YAML , something like the following:
Let's make our first Rails app
Welcome! If you're here, you'd like to learn to make Rails web apps. I'd love to take you through making the quintessential "To-do" list. Ingredients 1 computer 1 Terminal or Command Line Prompt 1 installation of Ruby and(on) Rails 1 text editor 1 happy coder
Integrating ActiveRecord with an SQLite3 database and RSpec Shoulda matchers into your Sinatra app
I ran into a lot of trouble getting this set up! Finally, everything fell into place. While planning out a Sinatra app for a new project, I decided to use ActiveRecord to handle my data storage.
Let's make Nyan Cat using the 'gosu' gem
When I'm not fighting crime and going about my daily coding life, I'm teaching kids to code computer games. We've recently been using the gosu gem, which is a ton of fun to use and makes creating games really simple. When making an introductory game, I want to avoid using the 'space shooter' example. I therefore decided that it was time to make an adorable game where you have Nyan Cat pick up…
Internationalization in RubyMotion Projects — Part 2
Over the holidays, I pondered on how I could make these scripts for slurping up localizable strings in RubyMotion projects easier for myself or other developers.
Internationalization in RubyMotion projects
It's not all Bachelor Project for me! One of my contract projects at the moment is to write an OS X app using RubyMotion .
Coaching at Rails Girls Vienna 2014
Last weekend, I had my first experience in coaching at a Rails Girls event. I loved every minute of it. If you've ever wanted to try out web programming in a great environment, or help out, what are you waiting for? There are events all over the world!
Homesick App — Setting up a CoffeeScript-written Node.js project
This is part of an ongoing series of posts about Homesick, my bachelor project .
PyLadies Vienna's Introduction workshop to Django
(Many thanks to @FloorDrees for the photos!)
Homesick App — Playing stored audio data on Android
This is part of an ongoing series of posts about Homesick, my bachelor project .
Homesick App — Recording and Storing Audio on Android
This is part of an ongoing series of posts about Homesick, my bachelor project . The Android side of the client is hosted here . I've had a small handful of experience in Android development, so I've drawn up a simple activity with two buttons for the time being:
Homesick App — Install plugins in Android Studio
This is part of an ongoing series of posts about Homesick, my bachelor project.
Starting out with Homesick
My Bachelor project is called "Homesick App", the description being as follows: