Lara Schenck

Lover of programming, maker of monsters

Three illustrated monsters peeking from the corners of the image looking at a photo of a white woman with brown hair drinking a cocktail. The photo is in a frame and the monster on the right is thinking, "Who's that?"

Hello! My name is Lara.

I am a PhD student in the Human-Centered Computing program at Georgia Tech where I will work with the DataWorks team and Dr. Betsy DiSalvo, but before that, I got my undergraduate degree in art and worked as a software developer for more than 10 years.

This personal-professional website has been dormant since mid-2024 when a sudden event completely and permanently changed who I am. I’m not sure if/when I’ll post new content on this site, but be sure to check out the Monsters and my professional-only website at larakarki.com.

Read more about me

This website is a chronicle of my career and the things I made and learned from 2009-2024.

You can read blog posts about things I’ve worked on and thought about, a log of my changing focus on my Now page, miscellaneous thoughts and musings on my Updates and Think-Alouds page, and a chronicle my evolving career/research direction on my Compass page and, finally, a more formal timeline of my career on my About page.

Updates (until mid-2024)

April 17, 2024 – I have officially passed my PhD qualifying exam!

January, 2024 – Submitted a paper to CSCW! Haven’t kept up with these updates…currently focusing on my qualifying exam and gearing up for v3 of Career Dev with DataWorks.

June 8, 2023 – My poster and lightning talk, “From Data Work to Data Science: Getting Past the Gatekeepers”, was accepted to ICER 2023!

April 1, 2023 – I was selected for the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship!

March 23, 2023 – I submitted a journal article! Can’t say more about it yet, but need to write about it here, too.

August, 2022 – Moved to Atlanta and started a PhD!

More Updates

Blog Posts

  • On the left a blue label reading "workplace computing tools" connected to a right label "computing career" with a dotted squiggly pathway
    What is Middle-Skill Computing Work?
    Middle-skill computing work is an emerging theme in my research to describe the kinds of work and jobs in computing that are not always considered “computing jobs”. Doing this work doesn’t require theoretical CS knowledge, and the jobs tend to be in $40-100k USD salary range. I think “middle-skill computing work” has significant promise for increasing access to computing careers, and I’d love to talk with more people about this idea.
  • A starfish snake plant in a small pot in front of a window. The plant is green and spiky.
    Updates and Think-Alouds: Aug. 16 ’22 – Aug. 19 ’23
    A whole year of notes from the, um, “Updates” page on my website, where I haphazardly write as I feel inspired to do so. This update includes notes about language learning, research updates, and think-alouds as I figure out academia.
  • Image of the poster I am presenting at the ICER 2023 conference. See the PDF for a screen-reader friendly version here: https://notlaura.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/ICER-2023-LSchenck-Poster.pdf.
    From Data Work to Data Science: Getting Past the Gatekeepers (ICER 2023)
    This post outlines my lightning talk and poster for the 2023 International Computing Education Research conference. It’s a nice update regarding where my research is headed and what I’m working on lately.
More Blog Posts

Greatest Hits

From 2015-2021, I was active in the CSS and front-end communities, writing blog posts and speaking about CSS all over the world. What I learned during these years set me on my path to research, and I developed a following based on my conference speaking and writing on this blog. Here are some “greatest hits” from this period.

  • Is CSS Turing Complete?
    I took a deep dive into this question, and the answer is: kinda, mostly, yeah! CSS + HTML + user input is Turing complete. Is it possible to remove the user input part? Then I can re-title this post to be more, ahem, declarative.
  • Writing CSS Algorithms
    The methods for white-boarding algorithm questions serve us quite well when writing CSS algorithms. This post is a written portion of the second half of version 1 of the Algorithms of CSS.
  • CSS is a Declarative, Domain-Specific Programming Language
    Over the past year, I’ve been giving a talk called The Algorithms of CSS, originally created for CSSConf EU. This post covers the first part of my presentation, and breaks down how CSS fits into the categories of programming languages.

Thanks for reading!

Really, I put a lot of effort into my website, and it is forever in-progress. I work on it with the hope that others will read my content and find something interesting, inspiring, or worthy of a smile.

I do not allow comments on this site, but I am interested in what you think about my work, and I love to meet new people. Feel free to email me at lara notlaura dot com with any questions or comments.