Wikipedia

Raquel Velez

Aug 25, 2015 — 8 min read

Someone (I don't know who) decided to write a Wikipedia article about me. The amount of information in this thing is incredible - the amount of energy, effort, and research that went into writing this article is absolutely humbling.

On Friday, 28 August 2015, the article was deleted for lack of notability. A lot of people chimed into the deletion discussion, and I'm really grateful for that. It's okay, folks. There will be other opportunities, I'm sure.

I have preserved what I could of the article just before it was deleted, as a thank you to the person (whoever you are) that wrote it.

I appreciate the amount of time you put into writing about me. I will not let the internet forget your effort.

❤️

Raquel Vélez

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Raquel Vélez
Born 1985
Other names Rockbot
Education B.S., Mechanical Engineering, Caltech, 2003-2007.
Graduate Studies, Robotics Engineering, Università degli Studi di Genova, 2009-2010.
Occupation Senior Engineer
Years active 2004 - present
Notable work AI.js, vektor, Convene, CrowdNotes
Awards Special Recognition for Community Outreach by the Laboratory Director, MIT Lincoln Laboratory (2009), Minority Student Education Outstanding Service Award, California Institute of Technology (2007), Caltech President’s Scholar, California Institute of Technology (2003 – 2007), Research In Science and Engineering Award Winner, German Academic Exchange Service (2006).
Website rckbt.me

Raquel Vélez (Pronunciation: [rakel beleθ]) is a senior Mechanical engineer and software developer currently developing the Node.js package manager (known as npm),^[1][2] and is one of the main contributors to NodeBots.^[3] She is an active contributor amongst the open-source development community, most prominently in the San Francisco Bay Area where she lives, and a resident at Recurse Center (formerly Hacker School).^[4] She has previously worked at Caltech, NASA JPL, the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and various universities in Europe.

Vélez was internationally educated at schools and universities in the US, France, Germany, and Italy and is a featured speaker at events and conferences throughout the United States, covering topics such as technology, robotics, and storytelling. She speaks English, Spanish, French, German, and Italian .^[5]

Vélez has contributed to a high volume of open source projects and is an active member in the web development industry .^[6]

1 Biography
1.1 Early days
1.2 Education
1.3 Leaving academia and working with node
1.4 Leadership and contributions
2 Publications
3 Interviews
4 Views on diversity
5 References
6 External links

Biography[edit]

Raquel Vélez is an American technologist and community leader. 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. Vélez's career shifted to web development in 2012, wherein she has since specialized in Node.js (JavaScript). She has worked at Skookum Digital Works, Storify, and Sauce Labs. She is currently a Senior Engineer at npm, Inc. and speaks at conferences around the world. Vélez has lived in 4 countries and speaks 5 languages.

Early days[edit]

Vélez parents were both chemical engineers. When still in high school, Vélez was convinced that she was going to be a film-maker, in particular, she wanted to do altered-reality and science-fiction-like films to explore the human reality. In her last years of high school, she was so good at maths and science, that she was invited to a local university where a lot of different engineers where presenting different topics. One of those speakers was a mechanical engineer, who showed the audience a robot she had built. Vélez was utterly impressed at the fact that somebody could made a real robot with their own hands, since, for her, they were just fictional movie characters made with special effects .^[7]

Education[edit]

This engineering event was a life-changer for her, and that same day she told her parents that she wanted to be a roboticist. At the time, she was more interested in building the robots than in the software, which she considered just "a means to an end". She went on to study mechanical engineering at Caltech and enrolled in the DARPA Grand Challenge.^[8] There were three teams, electronics, mechanics and software, and everybody was in the mechanics and electronic teams while nobody wanted to join the software team. Vélez joined the software team, since she was the only one who had done anything at all with code before.

After this experience, Vélez started getting involved in programming more and more, to the point that when she was finishing college, she was not as interested in robots as she was before. In 2009, just after the first semester, she dropped out the masters program in robotics she had started, because it got too theoretical with too few experimentation. Vélez felt that the robotics environment was too competitive, and having to pursue a PhD was not in her plans, since she didn't want to work on a long term project.^[9]

Leaving academia and working with node[edit]

Vélez finished internships in robotics at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Machine Vision Group,^[10][11] the Chair of Mechanics and Mechatronics, University of Duisburg-Essen,^[12] the Caltech RoboRescue Team, the MIT Lincoln Laboratory (in which she became leader/Co-founder of the Robotics Outreach),^[13][14] Applied Minds,^[15] founded Lightbulb Robotics and went to work at a startup in a blogging community for Hispanic women as a CTO.^[16]

Around 2011 she turned her interest into the internet and software development, specially front-end development.^[17]

In 2012 Vélez started working with Node.js, which at the time was new, and there were no tutorials or resources around. She started working on node full-time as a full-stack developer in several start-ups. Since the core members of the node community where living in San Francisco, Vélez and her husband decided to move there. She continued showing up at meet-ups and participating in conferences.^[18]

In 2014, Isaac Z. Schlueter called Vélez and asked her to join the team to found npm (software) as employer number one, with two other co-founders.^[19]

Leadership and contributions[edit]

Vélez has also been a board member and press liaison for Hackerspace Charlotte from 2011 to 2012, board member for the Latin American Coalition from 2011 to 2012,^[20] and Vice Chair for the World Economic Forum Global Shapers Charlotte Hub from 2011 to 2013.^[21]

Due to her notability, Vélez has been invited as a speaker to some of the most important conferences and live events in the tech industry, like JSConf,^[22] jQuery conference,^[23] CascadiaJS,^[24] Robots Conf.,^[25] or Platzi Live,^[26] among others.

Soon after npm launched from Node.js, this open source technology has become the runtime of choice for high-performance, low latency, I/O asynchronous applications,^[27] which are built on top of Node.js, ranging from robots to API engines to cloud stacks and mobile websites.^[28] Web applications like those of Fidelity, IBM, The Linux Foundation,^[29] PayPal^[30] or Microsoft^[31][32] are build on top of it.

Vélez is also a core developer of NodeBots, Arduino robots powered by Node.js and programmed with Firmata, who is leading the next generation of JavaScript robots, flying drones and quadcopters,^[33] with meetings all around the world and an International NodeBots day.^[34]

Publications[edit]

She is a co-author of the book Vélez, Raquel (2015-05-08). Make: JavaScript Robotics: Building NodeBots with Johnny-Five, Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and BeagleBone (1st ed.). Maker Media, Inc. p. 272. ISBN 978-1457186950.

She is currently part of the Reactive podcast ^[35] and was also a contributor to the Pastry Box project ^[36] during the year 2014.

Interviews[edit]

"Hilariously, Isaac Emailed Me" with Raquel Vélez - DESCRIPTIVE - 15 May 2015.^[9]
Programación de robots con Javascript - Platzi LIVE - 5 March 2015.^[37]
Rockbot - CodeNewbie Podcast - 20 April 2015^[7]
013: With Raquel Vélez - Ghost Talk Podcast - 19 May 2014.^[38]
103 JSJ Robots with Raquel Vélez - JSJabber Podcast - 9 April 2014.^[39]
Controlling Robots with node.js and Johnny-Five with Raquel Vélez - The Hanselminutes Podcast - 4 October 2013.^[40]
A Gentle Introduction to node.js with Raquel Velez - The Hanselminutes Podcast - 14 June 2013.^[41]

Views on diversity[edit]

Vélez has called the attention of the media over the topic of discrimination and unconscious bias against minorities in the tech industry. She has said she made a point of working at top universities such as Caltech and MIT to burnish her credentials, and she is not surprised Hispanics earn less in high tech, "Not only because I am Hispanic but because I'm female, I have had to work four times as hard as most of the folks in the industry".^[5]

She remembers being annoyed by the fact that, during her studies at Caltech, and not having a lot of women around, she sometimes was ignored due to unconscious prejudices. In particular, she remembers doing homework with her male classmates, telling them that she had the answer to a problem they were trying to solve, and nobody paying attention to her, until somebody else found the same answer.^[9] Vélez confessed that at first these systematic misogynistic situations got to her, but she didn't allow it to happen again and tried to focus in doing what she loved.

She maintains a list of Women Who Node ^[42] for women who are "not only Node devs, but also could be asked to speak at conferences". She also compiled a list of Latin American developers ^[43] and wrote a viral post about hiring diverse teams .^[44] She has also been cited as an inspiration for people who want to become developers too.^[45]