60 Seconds with WITS MidAtlantic 2019 Speaker — Kara Harkins

Kara Harkins is the Senior Developer for Web Applications at the Urban Institute. Her session at WITS MidAtlantic 2019 is an Introduction to Accessibility workshop.

Why is speaking at WITS important to you?

I love to see ‘typical non geeks’ come together to learn technology. Whether this means women, LGBT people, POC, or whatever. Speaking on accessibility here covers two of my major interests, accessibility and diversity/inclusion.

What inspires you?

Seeing what other people can accomplish.

Most useful article you’ve read in the last month

Nothing technical comes to mind right now as I usually just google whatever issue I am working on, read it, then move on. What I would recommend is pretty much anything for news though (especially covering a gamut of viewpoints) as that ALWAYS comes in handy, whether now or at some point in the future.

When you were a kid what was your dream job?

A physicist actually and that was what I started studying. Unfortunately computational physics back in the 80s did not sound like something ‘real’ so I went to my second choice of being a programmer.

Tell us something about your session

My hope is not to solve every problem in an intro course but to make people curious about finding answers to problems I did not cover.