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Articles

Many of my articles are published on Dev.to. Other articles that I've written are here. The articles listed here are my more significant or interesting writings. Some of these are from particularly engaging project announcements, some are really creative technical articles, some are thought pieces. I hope you enjoy them all. My work tends to fall into three categories: education thought pieces, project launches of creative works, and web and mobile technical pieces. You'll find posts here from my previous position at AWS, my past work at Microsoft, some work when I was a Developer Advocate for NativeScript at Progress/Telerik, and work related to my nonprofit, Vue Vixens (later renamed to Front-End Foxes).

  • The Last Saree - Connoisseurship in the Age of AI

    Let's explore an intersection of technology and artisanship by studying the special case of the artisan textile as a literal web that connects old and new, artisan and engineer, poet and scientist.

    14 Nov 2024

  • Welcoming More Girls to Computer Science in Middle School

    There is some disconnect in how girls perceive computer science, programmers, the craft of programming, and the career paths that are open to them. Let's get to work!

    29 Oct 2024

  • Wicked Awesome Apps for Students Built with PartyRock

    Amazon's new AI tool, PartyRock, is both a fun and useful tool that you can use right now to help you get organized, study smarter, and become generally more productive as a student. Let's discover the top 10 most wicked awesome apps built with PartyRock for students!

    27 Nov 2023

  • Generative AI for Education - A Curriculum and Instruction Perspective

    Discover the transformative power of AI in education alongside its many challenges for administrators, students and faculty alike. Join us as we explore its potential, challenges, and appropriate use in the classroom.

    14 Sep 2023

  • Announcing The Grad Project - Showcasing Innovative Student Research

    The Grad Project has allowed us to meet graduate students and learn about how they use AWS technologies to further their research goals and accomplish their projects. Stay tuned as we learn from them in person on LinkedIn Live in a series of two hands-on workshops available to be run by attendees, live, on SageMaker Studio Labs.

    11 Sep 2023

  • Build a Web App to Deliver Calming and Empowering Affirmations Using AWS Lambda and Amazon DynamoDB

    May is Mental Health Month, so why not take a little time to relax and build yourself a mindfulness app?

    29 May 2023

  • The Ethics of Generative AI Part 1 - Some Vocabulary

    The lightning-speed development of generative AI in various permutations has serious ethical questions on fair use. In this introductory article I tackle this vast topic by offering some vocabulary and a timeline

    7 Apr 2023

  • What Are JavaScript Engines?

    Originally written in 2015 and updated in 2023, this article is cited in Wikipedia on the topic. Ever wonder what kind of technology underlies JavaScript, the language of the web? Learn about the history and evolution of JavaScript's core.

    9 Nov 2022

  • Build a 'Green' Browser Extension

    Try your hand at building a browser extension to track the carbon intensity in your region. Great project for Earth Day!

    7 July 2021

  • Making Games with Autistic Students

    A Partnership between the National Museum of Computing, Track.org, and Azure Advocates

    22 Apr 2021

  • Introducing MaZine Learning, Zines about Machine Learning

    I'd like to announce the first 'drop' of five free 'zines' - all about Machine Learning! What are zines, you ask? Well, they are printable papers that you can fold into small personal magazines. These 5 are all about Machine Learning.

    1 Mar 2021

  • Ombromanie - Creating Hand Shadow stories with Azure Speech and TensorFlow.js Handposes

    While exploring the art of hand shadows, I wondered whether some of the recent work I had done for body poses might be applicable to hand poses. What if you could tell a story on the web using your hands, and somehow save a video of the show and the narrative behind it, and send it to someone special?

    22 Feb 2021

  • Blast Off With Azure Advocates - Presenting The Azure Space Mystery

    Azure Advocates and Community Advocacy PMs are excited to offer our third mystery experience, the Azure Space Mystery! Following on the Azure Mystery Mansion and the Azure Maya Mystery, this adventure sends you on missions in space to collect the four missing pieces of the wing. Store each piece in your space ship's Collection Bay and find your way to the ISS to save the day.

    11 Feb 2021

  • Announcing a New Kind of Boot Camp - Front-End Foxes School

    Front-End Foxes was a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, tax-exempt charity registered in Massachusetts, USA. We are people who identify as women and who want to learn front-end technologies to make websites and mobile apps. This blogpost announced our COVID pivot into launching a boot camp online.

    8 Feb 2021

  • Machine Learning for Artisans - Classifying Lacemaking Techniques

    The use of advanced inference techniques when visiting a museum collection may not be obvious. Learn how to use Lobe.ai to create a classification model to determine different types of lace

    22 Jan 2021

  • Saving Halloween 2020 with Azure Maps and Candy Caches

    In 2020, Halloween is in jeopardy. How do you safely trick or treat in a pandemic? Enter...Azure Maps!

    21 Nov 2020

  • Announcing a Free Curriculum - Web Development for Beginners

    Azure Advocates and Project Managers have launched a curriculum that you can access completely free of charge to take your first steps with JavaScript, CSS, and HTML, the building blocks of the web

    12 Nov 2020

  • Unraveling the Azure Maya Mystery and Building A World

    After the big success of the Azure Mystery Mansion, I created a three-part mystery scavenger-hunt type game called the Azure Maya Mystery, where you wind your way through a mystical pyramic, unraveling Maya glyphs along the way.

    2 Jul 2020

  • Ice Cream Or Dalmatian? Who Can Tell?! Building a Machine-Learning Powered PWA

    Using a cognitive service that builds on pre-trained models is a great way to dip your toe into machine learning models using some of the excellent Azure Machine Learning cognitive services , build a completely useless web app and have some fun doing it.

    19 Apr 2020

  • Deploy your Website on Azure with GitHub Actions like a Hipster

    I’ve been meaning to skill up in GitHub Actions for a while. You know that little tab that appears on your repo labeled Actions? That’s the one I keep failing to click on.

    1 Feb 2020

  • Front-End Foxes 2019 Retrospective and 2020 Roadmap

    2019 was a banner year for our organization. We are now a 501(c)(3) public tax-exempt nonprofit and we are here to serve our community! In this article, I’ll outline the work we did in 2019, the lessons we learned, and where we hope to go in 2020.

    31 Jan 2020

  • Merry and Bright with Azure Advocates’ 25 Days of Serverless

    We’re launching 25 Days of Serverless as a way for you to explore – any way you like – the promise and potential of serverless technologies. Over the month of December, you’ll be able to tackle all kinds of challenges that you can solve any way you like; we’ll offer solutions built on Azure, of course, but we’re curious how you would approach the problems we will present to you.

    19 Nov 2019

  • The Making of the Azure Mystery Mansion

    Using Twine, we created a spooky mystery mansion experience where folks can solve problems in each room, like entering codes into an old rotary phone to open hiding places. A groundbreaking project that I led at Microsoft.

    31 Oct 2019

  • Machine Learning for Mobile Poets - Meet the eMiLy app

    To celebrate National Poetry Month in August, I built a mobile app that might help jog your memory about a poet that you might have forgotten, or never heard about, but someone who evokes strong feelings in many folks who hold good memories from their literature classes. Let's talk about Emily Dickinson.

    1 Oct 2019

  • The Way of the Fox - The Vue Vixens Curriculum

    I cut my teeth designing curricula at Front-End Foxes, Inc., our nonprofit that helped thousands of women skill up in web and mobile dev. Here's our philosophy.

    15 Jul 2019

  • Microsoft Azure for Spoiled People

    A three part series that gives a good example of the type of content that works for newbies - and those just starting out with a new tech. It's probably outdated but a good sample.

    21 May 2019

  • Growth-Hack Your Career as a WIT

    Written for IWD 2019. It’s an exciting time to be a woman in a technical role. There is tremendous visibility within both large and small companies about the need for diversity and inclusion, and a growing understanding from the C-Suite that fostering diversity in the workforce HELPS, rather than hinders, team dynamics.

    8 Mar 2019

  • Build a Beautiful Website with VuePress and Tailwind.css

    Updated in 2023, this is an evergreen article that has a lot of likes. So, thinking as a Vue.js developer, what's the most efficient way to get a website up and running ASAP? VuePress immediately springs to mind.

    17 Dec 2018