About Leah

I'm an artist & software developer native to Cambridge, MA (USA), where I still live and work today.

I studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and spent over a decade working at the Museum of Science, Boston creating products for the web and using game development technologies to build and augment exhibitions. I am now focusing on raising my young family and channeling my technical skills and experience into freelancing and content creation.

Imagining and creating are my greatest joys. I aspire to create experiences that take people out of the normal flow of life, facilitate new perspectives, and celebrate beauty in the natural and built worlds.

Systems are a unifying thread connecting my passions of art and software. At a certain point, I reflected on my artwork and what excites me the most. For example, I've created art exploring constellations, the seasons, types of landscapes, and the Lunar New Year. They share a combination of open-endedness and structure — the system (be it spatial, chronological, etc.) is what curates them, and holds space for improvisation, personalization, and emotion. This proved to be a valuable framework when I delved into game design and development later on in my career (see my recent games Magic Puzzles and Haiku Tunes, as examples). The conceptualization of a work starts a fun process of filling in the pieces, with repeated satisfaction as those elements blend and speak to one another (sometimes on purpose, sometimes by chance).

At their core, art and programming are also both about creating things that didn't exist before. You may have an idea at the start, and the end product tends to be richer and more fascinating than imagined. I love going on these journeys!

Sharing my love of these disciplines and being of service to others is extremely important to me; it has become all the more important as I've become a parent and am dedicating more energy than ever before to passing on knowledge and caring for the next generation. Please browse my Resources, Writing, and Speaking below.

My other hobbies and interests include music (check out my YouTube channel!), gaming, dance, skateboarding, biking, yoga, gardening, and urban design.

Resources, Writing, and Speaking

• Running Horse

  This is my blog, launched October 2020. Here, I share my life journeys, creative passions, technical knowledge, and the amazing experiences where those intersect.

• Making Magic Puzzles with the Unity Game Engine

  Tech talk with Women Who Code Boston discussing the production, collaboration process, software architecture, and lessons learned creating the Magic Puzzles work. See slides and Twitter live thread

• Cracking the Code to Developing Creative Software Products

  Webinar featuring Magic Puzzles as a case study for how to plan, develop, and test a creative software product. The recording (September 2020) is available on demand via the Ascend tech community platform.

• Exploring Web Options (Web for Artists)

  Curriculum for artists for Studio@550, an arts center in Central Square (Cambridge, MA), presented in January 2018 part of the studio's Skillset series.

• Wireframing: Plan & Communicate Design with Ease

  Guest lecture at MIT (my alma mater) for their IAP Web Development Competition (2018) to help students prepare their project pitches (see slides or video recording)

• How to Push Through a Coding Rut and Begin Loving Learning Again

  Guest article for the Learn to Code With Me blog.

• Women Accelerators Mentoring Program Blog

  Mini-blog following the course of the Women Accelerators Mentoring Program, which matches early-to-mid-career mentees with mid-to-late-career mentors for a 6-month period. The entries I wrote are under "2017 Mentoring Program Wrap Up", which I wrote as a mentee and co-organizer of the program. The blog has since been maintained by new members of the organization.