Welcome to my personal blog and website. A little about me. I am a PhD and Polyglot with over two decades of experience in technology research, development and advocacy.
As a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Motorola (2001-2012), I worked on developing advanced concepts to showcase the company vision around seamless mobility. My work led to over 20 patent filings in areas including mobile computing, multi-screen experiences, context aware frameworks, ad hoc networking and large-scale sensor networks. I also oversaw university partnerships in research with leading institutions (including MIT, Purdue, CMU, UIUC, UMich, GeorgiaTech and USC), served as a Program Committee Member for several ACM and IEEE conferences, and was a Patent Committee Member and Subject Matter Expert in several related areas at Motorola Labs.
I have been a remote worker since 2008, when I moved to New York as a new parent with a focus on achieving a better work-life balance. It also motivated me to explore a career as an independent consultant (PI, BitNBot) with a focus on mobile & web development targeting early stage startups looking to build MVP. I also used the opportunity to explore my interest in teaching by joining SUNY New Paltz as an Adjunct Faculty, where I ran their first mobile computing course on Android for a grad/undergrad audience. I also mentored several Capstone projects to help students build their entrepreneurial skills, and served on the Industry Advisory Board of the ECE department.
The need for human interactions and technology conversations led me to discover regional meetups, and spurred my interest in community building, content creation, and conference organization. It combined my passion for teaching with my mission to drive more representation in tech. I gave my first community talk on social search in 2010, and my first developer-focused talk on Angular in 2013. I became a meetup co-organizer in 2014, going on to co-found two Google Developer Group chapters in New York and becoming a Google Developer Group Mentor for the NorthEast region. I was also accepted into the Google Developer Experts (GDE) program for my Flutter and Web Development expertise and spent the next five years organizing signature developer conferences (DevFest NYC, IWD NYC, PWA Camp, Android Camp), delivering training online and in-person, and consulting with local startups to help them modernize their engineering stack to reflect emerging trends in app development.
In 2018, I decided to pursue a full-time career that would help me accelerate and scale the impact I could have in community and technology advocacy. I joined the nascent Microsoft Developer Relations team as a Senior Cloud Advocacy PM for the US East region - focusing on startup and pro-developer communities. Over the next two years, I helped build an influencer program, oversaw our presence at core 1P/3P events, helped coordinate a global community event to empower under-represented speakers, and worked on the launch of the a virtual streaming platform (Learn TV) to tackle the shift to online events at the height of the pandemic. I also brought my passion for sketchnoting to work, starting a visual storytelling strategy (SketchTheDocs) that continues to be a proven tool for engaging and educating developers on complex technologies.
In 2021, I made the move from Program Management to Software Engineering & Content Development as a Senior Cloud Advocate on the Mobile Advocacy team, helping drive awareness and engagement around Microsoft's signature dual-screen device (Surface Duo) by revisiting my Android & Mobile Computing technology & community roots. In 2022, I moved to the JavaScript Advocacy team to leverage my expertise in Web Development to build awareness & engagement around core technologies like Progressive Web Apps, Azure Static Web Apps, Azure Functions, Playwright and more. A key outcome was the creation of the #30Days platform and strategy to support structured learning roadmaps around a specific technology with a themed month of activities. The platform was adopted by multiple teams, driving half a million content views in the first year and creating a reusable model that other teams were able to replicate. I also became interested in open-source projects and technical documentation, creating a new "Deconstructing OSS" format to help self-guided learners understand & extend complex architectures and codebases using signature developer tools like GitHub Codespaces and GitHub Copilot to accelerate their learning journey.
In 2023, I moved to the AI Advocacy team to pursue my interest in the rapidly growing space of generative AI applications and contribute my expertise with sofware development, technical documentation and visual storytelling to building developer awareness & adoption of the new Azure AI platform and related open-source and research projects. The past six months have been exhilarating and rewarding as we see the explosion of tools, technologies and use cases that are powered by natural language and AI. At Microsoft Build 2024, I was part of the team supporting the GA release of Azure AI Studio, and delivered the signature workshop I created that has now reached over 2.2K developers. It also made me realize how much I love working on these technologies and sharing my learnings in ways that empower others. My goal is to revamp this website and blog and use this as a destination to share both my personal learning journey and my professional projects and milestones and build an open-source set of reusable resources for the community at large.
Stay curious. Be fearless. Keep learning. ♥️