!!Con 2020 - Sparking Musical Joy at Home With Magnetic Stripe Swipe Cards and... by Helen Hou-Sandí

Sparking Musical Joy at Home With Magnetic Stripe Swipe Cards and Tiny Code! by Helen Hou-Sandi Voice assistants can be great, but when you throw in noisy households and small people who don’t speak clearly and are asking for things in multiple languages, plus the whole surveillance state thing, they’re not always a great solution! These same small people often don’t read, either, but they have lots of opinions. So what to do when they love music and you’re a programmer who’s tired of being on call as a human jukebox? You build off a video you saw once and bring joy home in the form of a Raspberry Pi, tactilely satisfying magnetic stripe swipe cards, stickers, and a 5 line Bash script! Helen is the Director of Open Source Initiatives at the fully-distributed agency 10up and a Lead Developer for the WordPress open source software project. When she’s not deep in a code editor or polishing UX, she likes to make complicated food, hang out with her family, and continue performing as a professional collaborative pianist.