Spotlight: Madame Robot
I remember very happy the time when I started with Creative Coding. In 2014/2015, from my perspective back then, there were very few people involved in it. Of course, it’s also because I’ve dived much deeper into the scene in the meantime, but it still seemed to me at the time that programming was an elitist outsider activity. This can still be illustrated very well today by the design quality of publications on the subject. Where once there was a formal frigidity, today it is colorful, diverse, and illustrative.
Yes, things have changed in the meantime, because there are more and more creative people from all kinds of fields who deal with programming languages like Processing and p5.js. Some people in the globally connected community stand out from the crowd for different reasons: by a special style, by engagement in the scene, by a certain topic or because of their special story.
Valerie Fuchs stands out for several reasons, but especially because of her story. She left her prestigious and certainly comfortable position in marketing at one of the world’s largest sporting goods companies a few years ago to start completely fresh and learn web development. It’s safe to assume that this was, and perhaps still is, a rocky obstacle course from a number of perspectives: firstly, because of the enormous complexity of the subject area and, of course, because it is unfortunately still a heavily male-dominated field.
Today, Valerie works at WeTransfer in Amsterdam and is building a community for creative coding in the Dutch capital. She uses p5.js and javascript for her teaching at Hyper Island and has developed an distinctive, unusual, fun and friendly style that appeals to whole new audiences. She also lectures, gives workshops, and initiates projects that advocate for women and diverse people in development professions.
You definitively should check out her self-initiated platform femalefreelancedevelopers.com
Connect with Valerie
https://valerie-fuchs.com
https://www.instagram.com/madame_robot/
https://cafe-robot.co
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