Gina is a front-end developer at VHX, specializing in iOS and Flash, with a penchant for spiritual advising and Victorian illustration. Born and raised in the spaghetti-laden streets of NJ, she now resides in the pierogi-laden streets of Brooklyn with her hypoallergenic Siberian Forest cat named Princess Vespa.

How did you get into programming?

As an introverted, geeky high school student in the glory days of grunge and MTV reality, I took to computers like a dread-locked white guy at a Phish concert, but I didn’t know there was such a thing as programming until midway through my zoological studies at college. In transferring schools, I’d been required to take a Visual Basic class and I distinctly remember the absolute delight in writing simple conditional statements and immediately becoming the teacher’s pet in a sea of mostly math-intolerant design students forced to fulfill a curriculum.

Soon after, I picked up HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and became a “web designer,” as back in days of yore, there was no such dichotomy between a designer and developer (hence, the web looked like bile). But my love affair with programming was not solidified until the discovery of a format that married art and science beautifully: Flash. This love would later come to be the object of derision for all the Internet, (not in small part due to an infamous letter by Steve Jobs), but for at least a decade, Flash was an absolutely wonderful, artistic, technical playground that made me a bona fide object-oriented programmer. From my early days as a creatively technical jackie-of-all-trades, my focus became programming in ActionScript 3, with a concentration in game development, and leading big projects for several advertising firms.

What are you working on now?

With Flash making a graceful exit, I wanted to shift gears and make games and apps for mobile devices and landed at VHX a year ago with the intention of building a VHX iOS app. Learning iPhone development has been super challenging, but it's been very rewarding to watch the app come to life in collaboration with developer James Dennis and our designer Michael Eades. It's also really interesting how my Flash skills have played a significant role in my ability to understand and polish the UI. I intend to write a future article on my process of creating fine-tuned animations for XCode using Flash and TexturePacker.

What is something you discovered recently that you really liked?

On the iOS front, I've been using a program called PaintCode for about a month now that has been indispensable in my workflow for making vector assets. Previously I had been using an Illustrator extension called Drawscript, but found it had difficulty with many shapes and could not work with compound paths. With PaintCode, I can import any shape as an SVG and have a complete output of Objective-C with live editing.

I've also discovered this organic coconut oil and Himalayan pink sea salt popcorn that is, as they say, off the hook.

What's a great movie you've seen recently?

I found the Nick Cave documentary, 20,000 Days on Earth at the Film Forum to be pretty inspiring. Many great quotes on the creative process and death, to which I can relate as a dabbler in songwriting. I was also deeply affected by Richard Linklater's extraordinary film, Boyhood. Most recently, we had a movie night here at VHX and watched Harmontown. Though I wasn't terribly familiar with Dan Harmon's podcast, I left with the warm solace of knowing there are so many hopeful freaks and geeks out there.