Hello world, Hola mundo!

I was born in 1977 in Juan José Paso, a small town in Argentina. I was six years old when my elementary school bought a computer (one computer for the entire school and the only one in the whole town). The moment I saw it I felt love at first sight. They taught us LOGO.

A few years later, we moved to Ingeniero Luiggi because my family had lost almost everything due to a flood. This new place was close to Realicó where I could study programming. So between ages 9 and 14 my parents drove 80 kilometers every Saturday to take me to class. We didn’t have a car, and there was no public transport because it was a rural area, but since my dad repaired vehicles, his clients lent him their cars to make the trip. I learned BASIC.

When I was 15, I started working teaching informatics. Since then, I have never stopped teaching and learning computing. In 1996 I became the first generation in my family to obtain a high school diploma. At that time the whole family moved again, to Santa Rosa with the hope I can study at the university. My family came with me because we didn’t have the money to send me to study. I couldn’t stop working, so I was a teacher at elementary and high school levels and I taught to teachers through the Red Federal de Formación Docente Continua (Ministry of Education) from 1996 to 1999. I also started developing software using dbase and FoxPro. I made my first sold (a car racing management system) in 1997. I also learned Turbo Pascal, C and C++.

In 1998 I started working at INTA, where I won two scholarships to finish my degree in computer science (2005) and my master’s degree in data mining and knowledge discovery (2015). I became a scientist starting as Research Software Engineer (although I didn’t know the job had that name). We used to code in C++ and ASP+HTML (and maintained code in BASIC and FORTRAN), then we moved to .Net framework (ASP.Net, Visual Basic .Net and C#), SQL and SAS; in 2009 I learned Python which I used for my master’s thesis and in 2010 I learned R which is my favorite language. I then began to have management roles such as Head of Division/Group/Area, Regional/Thematic Advisor, Coordinator (PI) of several projects and strategic knowledge networks, and the first woman member of the Board of Directors of the Natural Resources Research Center. I also received several awards and recognitions for the results of my developments and research.

In 2019 I started to teach at the undergraduate and graduate levels for several diploma courses (Data Science in Public Policy, Data Science in Agriculture and New Technologies for Agriculture) and a Bachelor’s Degree in Data Science. I also helped to create a master’s degree and a specialization in Data Science.

I organize a lot of events and conferences which led me to become chair of the AgroInformatics Congress from 2016 to 2021, general chair of the 49th and 50th Jornadas Argentinas de Informática, co-founder and co-chair of LatinR, global coordinator of useR! 2021 and co-chair of useR!2022. I also was organizer of CSV,Conf,v7 in 2023, the first time the conference comes to South America and helped with CSV,Conf,v8 in Mexico. I was Conference Team Lead at RForwards, a member of the useR! Working Group and a contributor of the useR! Knowledge Base.

In 2017 I became involved in communities of practice, particularly R-Ladies and the R-Community that impact my life and career in such a positive way. I co-founded the R-Ladies Santa Rosa chapter in 2017 and became a member of the R-Ladies Global Team in 2018. That same year we started the collaborative translation to Spanish of R for Data Science. I was involved in the translation of R-Ladies’s Rules and Guidelines, some lessons by The Carpentries and severals RStudio Cheat Sheets. This experience helped me to lead the translation of Teaching Tech Together in 2020.

These communities also gave me the opportunity to improve myself, in 2019 I became an RStudio Certified Trainer, since 2020 I’m an Software Carpentries Certified Instructor and since 2021 I’m a Carpentries Certified Trainer. In 2022 the community elected me as a member of the The Carpentries Execute Council and I became R-Ladies Project Lead. The AGU invited me to be a member of the Notebooks Now! Steering Commitee in 2021 and the Software Sustainability Institute invite me to their Software Camp Steering Commitee in 2022. I became a member of R-Ladies Board of Director in 2022 and Vicepresident of The Carpentries Inc. Board of Director in 2023.

I am a prolific international bilingual speaker and teacher thanks to these communities.

The community experience is so empowering that it encouraged me to co-found, in 2020, a new community called MetaDocencia, an open, free, volunteer-lead, not-for-profit, educational organization that teach how to teach and technical skill to people from underserved countries. I was part of MetaDocencia’s Core Team and co-lead from March 2020 until May 2022, during which we were awarded two Code for Science & Society grants and one CZI grant.

In 2022 I become a GitHub Stars as recognition for my work inspiring and education the community. I recibe de award in 2023 and 2024.

Now I’m the Community Manager of rOpenSci a community transforming science through open data, software & reproducibility.

Last but not least, in 2004 I met the man who became my partner in life and in 2012, 2013 and 2015 we became proud parents. In 2012 we lost Ana, our first child. Now we enjoy watching with wonder what beautiful people our other two kids are becoming.

If you want to contact me, you can find me on Mastodon