Interview
- and make them interactive. You could
even embed it all around your house and
create your own way of interacting with
interfaces or devices without having to
pick up your phone.”
Gerard builds her prototypes in her
personal time to learn technologies she
doesn’t get to use at work. A senior front-
end developer by day, she’s had roles at
ThoughtWorks, the New York Times and
most recently Atlassian, where she
focused on improving the user experience
of project management software Jira. Now
she’s about to join Netlify in Amsterdam.
Astonishingly, Gerard – also a Google
developer expert – only moved into web
development five years ago. Having
started out in advertising as a digital
producer (a type of project manager) at a
few agencies in Paris and Sydney, she
worked with developers at a time when
3D came to the browser via WebGL. She
realised she was more excited about the
interfaces they were building than her
own job, so she decided to quit and enrol
in a 12-week General Assembly bootcamp.“Understanding the
basics doesn’t take that
long. It’s about coming
up with an idea, starting
with a small goal, then
diving a bit deeper”
with an Arduino microcontroller and
TensorFlow.js to play Street Fighter with
body movements. The latter combines
machine learning with another one of
Gerard’s passions: hardware. And this
features quite heavily in her projects, for
example when she built wearable
interfaces in JavaScript to use clothes as
an input device. “I came across conductive
thread, which is embedded with stainless
steel,” Gerard explains. “If you attach a
microcontroller, you can get data from it
just as if you plugged in a wire. So when
your body comes in contact with the
thread, you can use that as an input. It’s
really flexible and easy to work with. You
can sew it into clothes, a pillow, a towel
or a couch – anywhere that you have fabric
Photo: You Gotta Love Frontend 2019 Lithuania