60 Seconds with WITS Northeast 2020 Speaker — Amy Haskins

Amy Haskins is a Principal Quality Engineer / Senior Team Lead at Mathworks. She is co-leading a hands-on workshop at WITS Northeast 2020 — Pocket AI and IoT: Turn Your Phone Into a Smart Fitness Tracker.

• Why is speaking at WITS important to you?

Speaking at WITS is a huge opportunity to share my knowledge and passion for technology with others and at the same time learn from other amazing women in the tech community. Sharing ideas and experiences beyond our individual organizations helps propel us forward.

• What inspires you?

I’m inspired by having new and interesting problems to solve. I’ve worked on many different products and with different teams over the course of my career and each change has brought with it new things to learn and new ideas that help fuel my creativity.

• Most useful article you’ve read in the last month

Sporadic test failures are the arch-nemesis of software quality engineers. I recently came across a blog post “Tests that sometimes fail” from Sam Saffron on the subject. It resonated well with some of the other reading and presentations I’ve seen on the subject. In addition to covering common sources of sporadic failures, it has some interesting ideas like making tests faster so that they can more easily be run repeatedly to diagnose the problem.

• When you were a kid what was your dream job?

As a kid, I really thought I wanted to be a math teacher. I started college with that plan, but after taking a CS course I fell in love with programming. I still finished the math degree but immediately switched my second major.

• Tell us something about your session

In our session “Pocket AI and IoT: Turn Your Phone Into a Smart Fitness Tracker”, Amita Amte and I will have you up and moving as we walk you through the design of a fitness tracker using the MATLAB Mobile App and the sensors on your smart phone. We’ll show you ways in which you can incorporate AI and IoT without needing to be a domain expert.

• What other session/speaker are you excited to see?

I’m particularly interested in the DIY Accessibility Testing Workshop. This has been a hot topic and I am excited to learn more about ensuring our software is accessible to people of all abilities.

Register here to see Amy at WITS Northeast in Philadelphia on April 23 & 24.