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This week’s interview is with Michelle Becker.

Jessica Barton: What is your job title?
Michelle Becker: Junior Software engineer.

JB: What does your work at LCOGT involve?
MB: Coding! Currently I’m working on visualization of the scheduler - It’s a web application that allows you to visualize what is going on inside the scheduler. In the past I’ve worked on other web applications and data visualization including the weather page of the LCOGT website.

JB: Could you tell us a little bit about yourself - your education, interests, past work experiences.
MB: I grew up in Whittier near Los Angeles. I did my undergraduate degree in film and media studies at UCSB. While I was doing my degree I took some higher level math, science and programming classes for fun. I met Val Gorbunov in a physics class and when he found out I could program, he told me about LCOGT and I ended up here.

During college I worked on campus as an associate producer/director for UCTV. My interests are in the visual arts, and I definitely try to find outlets to be creative in that area.

JB: What led you to the career or job you are doing now?
MB: I’ve always been interested in working with computers. I spent a lot of time doing video editing during school and was eventually tempted to learn Adobe After Effects. Some of the graphics are actually drawn using their coding language and I was curious to learn more about how that works so I took some programming classes. As it would turn out, I found Python really fun. It was definitely cool getting a different insight into how computers work and the many things one could do with them. I was totally blown away the first time I typed ‘ls’ into a terminal - I felt like another world had just opened up for me.

JB: What is a typical day at work like?
MB: A lot of my day is spent planning or designing the architecture of what I will be working on. I work pretty closely with Eric Saunders, usually we are brainstorming or discussing the design of the current web application and the next plan of action - this is especially true now that I am spending more time on the scheduler project. The rest of my time is spent putting those plans into action through programming, testing, and getting new features out there.

JB: What advice would you offer people wanting to go into the type of work you do?
MB: Never stop learning and be flexible! There will be a lot of times where you have to change or augment what you thought you knew was the best way to do things. Also, you have to test, test, test, and then test some more. You can never test too much when you are programming!

JB: What do you do in your spare time?
MB: I spend quite a bit of my time doing ballroom dancing. Recently I’ve been trying to learn to cook, which has been somewhat of an adventure. I love movies, so I watch a lot of those. I also like to read, and try to find time for painting and drawing random things.

JB: I understand you are leaving LCOGT soon. What is your next step?
MB: I’m not exactly sure yet. I’m planning to move to the Bay Area and look for a tech job. I’m hoping to find something where I can use my creative skills, so maybe some kind of visual front-end design job for a start-up.

JB: Thanks Michelle!