ESRI Hackathon 2013
Hello and Welcome! I am Mara. I have been fascinated by technology for as long as I can remember. As a child, I used to get myself into trouble constantly for taking electronics apart to see how they work. My interest in software development began when I started playing with computers and realized they didn’t do everything I wanted them to do out of the box, so I started looking for ways to fix them. What I found was more than a career, I found a passion.
After graduating college with a Mathematics degree, I began looking for a job as a programmer. I had done plenty of programming in college and on my own, as a hobby, but getting a programming job without real-world programming experience proved impossible nonetheless. So my first job fresh out of college was Engineering Technician for Samson, at that time a privately owned, medium size E&P company. Most of my work involved data manipulation in Excel and Access. I soon realized that most of what I did could be automated, so I started building VBA macros to make my job easier. Word around the company spreads fast, especially when it comes to finding a way to work less, so pretty soon my macros were being used by people I had never even heard of. From there it was smooth sailing. The GIS department heard of my mighty macros and wanted me to move to the GIS group to write VBA macros and Python scripts for them. And that’s when I discovered something I like even more than writing code. Writing Python code! Within a year, I had a plethora of macros and scripts and no way to deploy them because the GIS group was not in the IT department, so I got moved to the IT department to do it all over again, but as a real programmer this time.
Over the years I have written several applications and used a lot of different technologies and languages. I’ve worked mostly with .Net and Python, and have gained enough familiarity with JavaScript to program my way out of a paper bag. Recently, I’ve been messing with Swift and am hoping to have an iPhone app published in the near future.
Got more questions about me?
I’d love to answer them. Send me a message through the Contact Me page.
