Briefly about me
My name is Carla Florencia Griggio, I'm 24 years old and I'm from Buenos Aires, Argentina. My main language is Spanish, but I'm also quite good at English and I know a little Japanese too.
I'm a teaching assistant of 'Paradigmas de Programación' (Programming paradigms) at the UTN, where we teach an introduction to object oriented, logical and functional programming.
I've worked building websites for about 3 years, but since one year and a half ago I'm more into software development (specially with Smalltalk).
About my study
I'm a senior student of Information Systems Engineering at the UTN (Universidad Tecnológica Nacional - National Technological University). I'm trying to orient my career towards software development (specially object oriented) and management.
I've also taken seminars and courses about iPhone apps and web development, which were great as a kick off to continue learning those subjects on my own. I'm pretty much into user interfaces so I try to study about that on my own whenever I have some free time.
My interests
I like teaching a lot, and as I've already mentioned I'm really into user interfaces. Therefore, I'm really interested in communicating ideas. For example, I like thinking about different ways of teaching, the communication within a software project, how to catch the atention of a website visitor, what's the right name for an object in my oop software design, etc.
As for my interest in user interfaces it is quite general. For example, I'm into graphic design of user interfaces, user experience, usability, programming user interfaces, even the marketing ideas that sometimes are related to them. Lately I've also started to play a little with graphical 3D programming, I'm taking a course on that this semester.
I love designing object oriented software, learning about it and teaching it too.
Some off-topic interests: I enjoy singing, learning new languages (this year I'll start learning italian) and I love cats.
My non-Smalltalk experiences so far
I've been into websites building for some time (as a freelancer), so I gained experience in several aspects related to that:
- Websites programming (PHP and some other server-side languages, javascript and some of it's cool frameworks -Prototype, Scriptaculous, etc.-, Actionscript and of course XML, XHTML and CSS)
- User interface design for websites (how to build simple and nice user interfaces that communicate the website's owner objectives and intentions successfully and are also usefull to it's visitors)
- Search Engine Optimization
- Managing websites projects
I've participated in some Java projects for some courses I took at university.
Right now I'm slowly building my first iPhone app while I learn about Objective-C and Cocoa Touch.
I'm also familiar with Prolog and Haskell because I help teaching them at university, but I haven't actually worked with those languages yet.
My Smalltalk experiences so far
I learned Smalltalk at the same course of my university where I'm now a teaching assistant, 3 years and a half ago. We used Dolphin then, now we're about to start using Pharo.
In november 2008 I started working on a project for the National Ministry of Education of Argentina. The idea was to finish a Squeak and Seaside project that would simulate teacher salaries within the whole country, but it was poorly designed and we chose building it from scratch.
I mainly took care of the user interface of the system, but I've also designed a great part of the system's logic and did a lot of domain analysis. We started building the system using Squeak and Seaside, then we ported it to Pharo, but when we had to decide how we would manage persistence we ended up using GLASS.
After almost one year and a half, this system has just been deployed! So I can say that I have strongly participated in a successful Smalltalk project :)
Why am I interested in Smalltalk?
Because it's easy, it's simple, and I can have nice code. It reflects pretty much straight what object oriented programming means and the syntax it's really simple, so once you understand the paradigm, Smalltalk helps you to program object oriented almost without learning any new language. The simple syntax and the clean code helps producing code that auto-explains itself, and I love that.
Will I stay with Smalltalk after the project is finished?
Of course. I teach Smalltalk and I enjoy doing that, so that kind of keeps me "sticked with it". I've also enjoyed a lot working with Smalltalk. I'd like to keep working with Smalltalk and start contributing to the community that helped me on my work through great frameworks and already made solutions.
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