About
Short third-person version (this is what I copy-paste into boxes asking for a “speaker bio”):
Mel is a hacker. Over time, Mel has progressed from hacking hardware (electrical engineer) to code (software developer) to organizational cultures (community QA team lead). She now hacks communities of practice as a member of Red Hat’s Community Architecture team. These days, Mel spends most of her time with on open source in education, teaching professors how to teach open source, leading the Fedora Marketing team, and generally getting things out of the way of people who want to Get Stuff Done. In her hypothetically existent amounts of free time, she volunteers for Sugar Labs and works on undergraduate engineering education reform, occasionally at the same time.
Longer and hopefully more fun version:
My name is Mel. I’ve been called a hacker by other hackers. Pressed for a short job description, I would say that I engineer educations. I’ve also been called an open-source community ninja, catnip gardener (from the old adage that managing programmers is like herding cats), and a Swiss Army Person or a Hack Of All Trades.
My quest is to make a world where makers make themselves, and I’m particularly intrigued with the space between how hackers learn and how engineers are taught (in undergrad and beyond). Someday I hope to become a professor of electrical engineering. There’s plenty to do before that, though. In between getting graduate degrees in education (with a cognitive science focus) and sociology, I’m roaming around the world, running unconferences, writing textbooks, working on interesting projects that I love, and honing my sketching and improvisation skills with pencils, sci-fi short stories, code, food, pianos, and occasionally cameras and stages (though I’m more often dressed in black behind the scenes hauling ropes to make the curtains rise, as befits a techie ninja).
I work for: Red Hat’s Community Architecture team. It’s a whirlwind apprenticeship, and I love it. (The usual disclaimer that this website speaks for me and not my employer applies; in order to compensate for that last boring sentence clause, here is a random article from Wikipedia.)
You may also know me from: Fedora, Sugar Labs, One Laptop Per Child, the MIT Media Lab, Design Continuum, Appropedia, or The Open Planning Project.
I love hardware, especially if it’s meant to be a generative platform. Somewhere in the depths of my files is a piece of paper from Olin College that says I can BS about electrical engineering, my choice of major being a canonical masochism story involving a dartboard and the decision to study the field I had the least background in and the most terror of. (The terror is now gone. The background is nonzero and monotonically increasing.) I’m intrigued by the design of platforms meant for engineers to use in creating products of their own; in an ideal world, I’d make nothing but demo boards, APIs, and developer toolkits. I’ve recently been looking into hearing aid designs, which has prompted me to overhaul my rusty knowledge of audio processing, embedded engineering, and personal fabrication (I swear they’re all related).
I love software, especially if it’s free (in both senses of the word). My introduction to open source, Linux, and programming involves some high school friends, a stack of Debian install floppies, and several painful weeks that have left me perpetually thankful for the advances in installers since that fateful day. I live in .txt, .c, .cpp, and .py files (okay, and .bashrc) and learn things by filing bugs and writing documentation, a trait that fellow hackers occasionally find endearing. Though I can and have developed code, when I work on it in my free time I’m more interested in supporting development communities with tools and infrastructures than I am in actually doing development myself. I’ve worked in QA before, and it intrigues me. I’d rather read about metrics and methodologies than algorithms (though those are cool too), and software marketing and licensing models are the primary reasons you’ll find me hanging out at business and law schools occasionally.
I love learning things by teaching them. I’m one of those people who can’t not teach, no matter what they’re doing. One phenomenon I’m intrigued by is that of improbable mastery; what makes people persevere at something they’re initially terrible at, and how do they transform from “utterly confused” to “one of the best in this domain”? It’s this kind of transformation I try to go for when I teach, which is why I especially like teaching college-level classes to newbies or cross-disciplinary populations with lots of students from outside “my field.” I have a strange habit that compels me to produce documentation as a side effect of learning something new, which tends to make my teachers very happy.
I love thinking about learning, which I usually describe with long-winded buzzwords like “sociological observations of communities of practice” in the hopes that a graduate school will someday decide my doctoral thesis idea (comparing societies of open-source developers with societies of undergraduate engineering project teams and seeing what they can learn from each other) is actually marginally sane. I’m interested in how to make things happen within technical academia, testing and documenting how to tweak the systems of processes and people who make decisions on how our future engineers will learn.
Non-standard modifiers: I was the first person in my extended family to grow up and be schooled outside the developing world (the Philippines), and the first to develop hardware, software, and participate in internet communities. I grew up as a “disabled” kid with a hearing loss severe enough to warrant a host of technological aids, special classes, and a full-time sign language interpreter. It was an interesting childhood.
In my copious amounts of free time, I eat things, make noise, and hit stuff. (What? It’s more entertaining than saying “my hobbies include cooking, playing a multitude of instruments – primarily piano, but also cello and guitar – and working towards tournament competition in mixed martial arts, particularly in a Chinese style called Sanda.)
It is rumored that I am occasionally unconscious. However, I have yet to witness this, despite having stayed up multiple nights in attempts to record the phenomenon. I also secretly posesss a time-turner.
