I just ended an 8 year adventure as a Senior Engineer at Google. My most recent team was Magenta making music and art with Machine Learning; I built the majority of the user-and-model interactions, such as these ones. Here's the publications I was on during that time.
In 2020 I also did a 6 month fellowship with the Trevor project, where I lead a team that worked on classifying suicidal ideation posts on a social media platform.
Prior to 2018, I worked on Polymer, and was a big advocate for Web Components in both the open source and standards communities. I maintained and owned one of the first (and at the time, largest!) suite of custom elements. During this time I was also a member of the Emoji subcommittee, which is a career high 😃 .
Before that, I used to work on Chrome. Do you know that little button that has appeared in top right corner of your browser? Yeah, I did that (but now it looks different. It's been 6+ years after all). Before that, in the prehistoric times, I worked in finance, despite not really understanding or caring about it. I have a masters in Computer Science from McGill University. I wrote a thesis on Reinforcement Learning, which you can read here, though I'm not sure why you would.
I've recently started making more art and selling it on my online shop, which is something I've wanted to do all my life!
✨ Do you want us to work together?
I am available for freelance work in a consulting capacity (not as a full-time engineer), or as a tech advisor for your company. My areas of expertise are the web platform, creative applications and interactions, and usable machine learning. I care deeply about users, performance, accessibility, and having things be functional. I am especially interested in (creative) projects that help people create things, public sector organizations and non profits.
If you'd like us to work together, check out the ways in which I can help your company.
☎︎ Do you want to just say hi?
My social media hell of choice is Twitter, where I'm pretty responsive. I also have a GitHub AMA repo where you can ask me things, or read what other people have asked me. If you really need to, you can send me an email, but know that it'll take me an embarassing time to reply. It's not you, it's misplaced anxiety.
📝 Are you a conference and need a bio?
Monica is a creative coder and recovering software engineer that likes to build silly things. In the past she's worked on Magenta, machine learning, web components, and Chrome, and has probably at least once broken the Internet for you. She is passionate about delightful user experiences, unreasonably excited about emoji, wary of web fonts, and will become your best friend if you bring her cheese. On second thought, she may be a mouse.
If you need a headshot, I recommend this one. (Thanks to Pujaa Rajan for making me look like a respectable adult!)
⁉ What are these cute emoji?
Why, thank you for asking! They are from the original Docomo emoji set, from the birth of time (2001). A while back I made a font of them, and this year I decided I hadn't been using them enough.