About

Hi! People often ask me for a bio. One of the ones below should suffice :-)

Twitter-ish Bio

purveyor of flan, platypus caretaker at @slackhq, former wombat caretaker at @npmjs, polyglot, craft engineer, speaker of things at places

Conference Bio

Raquel Vélez is the engineering manager of the Platform App Discovery team at Slack Technologies, Inc. in San Francisco, CA. Before her tenure at Slack, she was employee #1 at npm, Inc, helping the company grow to 30 people. Before that she worked at a variety of startups and institutions around the world, ranging from robotics to JavaScript. Raquel took both experiences to help found the Nodebots community, and she is a co-author of the book Make: JavaScript Robotics. In her off time, you can find her sewing, driving fast cars, speaking, and hanging out with her hilarious husband and two cats dressed in dog suits.

Generic Bio

Raquel started playing on the web after ditching the never-going-to-happen robot revolution. She currently works at Slack Technologies, Inc as the engineering manager of the Platform App Discovery team, and has previously worked at places like npm, Caltech, and NASA JPL (among others). She's fairly certain laughter and chocolate will cure almost everything. She is a co-author of the book Make: JavaScript Robotics.

Big Kid Bio

Raquel Vélez is an American technologist and community leader with a global perspective. She studied Mechanical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and worked as a roboticist for 8 years at a variety of institutions, including the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the University of Duisburg-Essen, the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, the University of Genoa, and Applied Minds. Raquel's career shifted to web development in 2012, wherein she specialized in Node.js (JavaScript) before switching gears into Engineering Management. She has worked at Skookum Digital Works, Storify, Sauce Labs, and npm, Inc. She is currently the Engineering Manager of the Platform App Discovery Team at Slack Technologies, Inc. and speaks at conferences around the world. She is a co-author of the book Make: JavaScript Robotics: Building NodeBots with Johnny-Five, Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and BeagleBone. Raquel has lived in 4 countries, speaks 5 languages, and currently lives in San Francisco, California.