Automata and Flowers

I really like fashion and I love making clothes. I am in general a crafty person whose toxic trait is thinking that anything can be built with any scratch material. I grew up watching my grandmother making clothes for my dolls and I, until I ended up making them with her, having fun, and learning the basics. It took so long until I could sew a straight hem! My parents’ house is full of weird DIY projects, hardly wearable clothes, and drawings, with clothes for any occasion. I guess I was a creative kid, and I clearly remember - during high school - coming home and trying to come up with at least one new look a day. I thought I was going to become a fashion designer. I recently went through those drawings and thinking back about that little girl who used to watch runways - religiously - on the only TV channel that would stream them on Sunday afternoons :)

I have scoliosis and had to wear a brace for quite a few years as a teenager. Needless to say, it made me feel miserable. I remember the only thing I liked about going to the technician for the brace fitting and checkups: it was near a fabric store - and my mum and I would sometimes stop ther and buy some fabric after the appointments. I remember my first Burda, buying some fabric in that store, and I believe somewhere I still have that first attempt at a dress. It is all wonky, I could not sew straight, and in my ambitions had picked up a rather hard project.

Then, engineering happened, and making clothes became an activity that I had very little time for - only during the very few breaks from coursework, when I went back to my parents’ house. I used to go visit an old relative who has been a seamstress for her entire life, spend an afternoon with her going over my designs and learning. That’s how I really started learning the basics, from “shoulders should always be 12 cm” to “cut with no mercy”. I owe her a lot, and it’s with her that I sew the dress I wore for my BSc graduation. The first actually wearable dress I made from scratch :)

A few years later, I moved to the UK and started working. Near my city there is a small fabric shop, that used to host classes. I had just moved and decided to go for a shirt-making class. It was my first real sewing class, and I was taught a lot of rules that I never knew existed! Coming out of there, I asked the shop owners if they had any second-hand sewing machines I could buy: they gave me a phone number and two weeks later I had my first sewing machine, bought with one of my first salaries :)

For the longest time, I kept this part of me separated from my engineering and technical persona. I don’t want to be perceived frivolous - or worse, incompetent - because I like fashion. I like computers, I like maths, I like thinking and writing code.

Moreover, I feel like fashion and design tend to be associated with femininity, and anything concerning femininity intertwines weirdly with the technical, male-dominated environments. So I don’t know if this hiatus I perceive is accentuated by the fact that, being a woman, I am constantly scared that people around me might think that I’m not good enough, or that I’m only here because I am a woman. Partially, I am scared that showing more frivolous aspects of me will hinder my credibility as a researcher. Not that is has actually happened or anything - I am just scared it might, and end up preemptively trying to prove myself. And the more I talk about these matters with my amazing girlfriends in STEM and academia, the more I realize this is actually a rather shared experience. So how does one keep everything together?

A few months ago I found myself reflecting about these topics, and wondering how can I confidently be someone who likes fashion, design, making clothes - and is also passionate about her research and computer science. I was making a jacket with a wonderful, silky, olive green velvet that a friend brought me from his mum’s store in Singapore. I wanted to wear the jacket at a conference presentation: wearing my garments gives me confidence, makes me feel good and proud. And also, conferences are the perfect occasion to wear special clothes :)

I thought to myself: what do I like besides making clothes? And my heart went back to my master thesis, and my love for automata theory. Automata are an incredibly versatile abstraction in computer science, we can use them to describe so many different things. Turns out, they are also incredibly pretty, simple, and can be drawn to mean a lot of different things.

So my “conference jacket” now has flowers, that - when looking closer - have tiny little arrows on the petals, which are in fact transitions from a state to itself.

And now the final piece of the puzzle. I had my first call with a new Lead the Future mentee, and she asked me how I feel being a woman in my job. I think I will remember this moment fondly: I used to be the one asking mentors and inspiring professionals around me how it feels, and now someone asks me? Crazy. Anyways, talking about our experiences made me think about how long it takes to learn how to keep everything together: the fashion, the maths, the frivolous, the coding. And how I want to keep track of these moments, write them down, and look back in a few years from now, maybe as a designer - maybe as an engineer.

Sometimes, keeping it all together looks like a flowery jacket in my favorite fabric, worn on a conference stage, while talking about LLVM’s backend.