These end of year posts are weird to write. I’m trying to reflect on the past year, but then I look back on the past decade and think about all the pivotal moments. Sure—this year was special, but I don’t think it compares to the risks I took in the past 10 years. If I were to show my 10-years-ago-self what current-self is up to these days, I think she would be proud and even relieved that things turned out okay.

The thing about reflecting on decisions and behavior over the course of a decade is that patterns emerge. You…

The recent news about Cuba has me wondering if I’ll ever be able to visit again. I went for the first time a little over 2 months ago — I came back and told everyone it was one of the most magical places I had ever been. Difficulties getting internet access was a mild inconvenience and kind of a perk of traveling there (although no-internet would be a nightmare for some, understandably). Despite the difficulties, it wasn’t impossible, and it proved to be an interesting experience.

Cuba is about 300 miles from Miami (where I’m from), and even though it…

I’m taking Information Security and Privacy for my graduate program right now, and the topic has diverted this week to containerization and serverless architecture. I’ve decided to document getting a function set up on GCP (Google Cloud Platform) because I haven’t really dabbled with any function-based platforms yet. My knowledge on serverless is pretty much “it’s a function in the cloud” which doesn’t say much, so I’m hoping to grasp a little more what the implementation looks like with this.

I’m choosing GCP (over AWS or Azure) because I like their documentation and console. …

This post will cover the fundamentals of deploying a single web application as taught in a Women Who Code NYC workshop. Everything should be followed from start to finish through this post.

What we will do

The objective is for everyone to be able to create their own app, push the code to GitHub, and deploy the code to an app on Heroku. This is designed to focus more on concepts of the software development process, and less on the technical pieces of it (ie. coding, version control, etc). …

I’m not sure when this happened, but it has just dawned on me that I’m an “experienced” developer. I mean, I still don’t really know what I’m doing, but enough years have gone by that I can pretend like I do (with confidence!). I went to EmberConf this year, and the event that stuck out to me was a mentorship gathering that brought together people new to the industry (or new to Ember.js) and those that were more experienced with JavaScript, Ember, tech conferences, and other open-source related things.

There was a speed-date style rotation of mentors with mentees, and…

A lot of people reflect on their year before it ends. On the last day of the year, I saw lots of posts of what people learned and accomplished in 2018.

Not me. I prefer to do my reflecting a little bit late. Since my birthday comes early January, it gives me a buffer to reflect on my year. It was an interesting year: I left a job I was emotionally attached to, I decided to go back to school, I joined a company I had admired for years, and I learned a lot in between. …

I’m not an extrovert. I’m not very good at making conversation with people I’ve just met. If I make the decision to speak up in a meeting, I have a 15-30 second debate in my head about my word choice and whether I should say anything at all.

So when people ask me, “How did you start speaking at tech conferences?” The answer is always, “I dunno… I just started doing it.” That statement could not be more true. …