Karishma Chadha
Research Assistant at MIT Media Lab
Greater Boston United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top School
Top expert inFont and Web Development Technologies
Karishma Chadha is a research-focused software engineer with 14 years of experience at the intersection of programming language design, computer security, and educational technology. Based in Greater Boston, she has driven front-end and systems work for influential open-source projects such as Scratch and Blockly, contributing key rendering, variable handling, and UI features used by millions of learners. At MIT Media Lab and the Scratch Foundation she has combined hands-on engineering with team leadership—shipping features like layer-ordered WebGL rendering for Scratch 3.0 and refinements to App Inventor’s accelerometer component. Her background in formal languages and security (including work on secure information-flow frameworks) informs pragmatic, maintainable designs for novice programmer tooling. She is also a creator and educator at heart, blending research, design, and code to improve how people learn to program.
13 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science - MS, Media Arts and Sciences, MIT Media Lab, Master of Science - MS, Media Arts and Sciences, MIT Media Lab at Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyBachelor of Arts (B.A.), Computer Science, Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), Computer Science at Wellesley College
Hindi, French, Korean
Github Skills (31)
webgl10
javascript10
variable-length10
appinventor10
css10
memory-management10
variable-binding10
blocks10
user-interface10
system-management10
ui-design10
data-management10
android-development10
java10
javas10
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
scratchfoundation/scratch-blocks
Nov 2017 - Apr 2022
Scratch Blocks is a library for building creative computing interfaces.
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:253 commits, 93 PRs, 54 pushes in 4 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Karishma primarily contributed to the front-end development of the Scratch Blocks library. Their work focused on implementing and refactoring the functionality of broadcast messages, including creating, deleting, and renaming these messages. They modified existing code and added new functionality for the user interface, including improving rendering of the comment section and the drag-and-drop functionality to align the components. The user also addressed issues related to the flyout and variable interactions within the block-based programming environment.
interfacesscratchscratch-blockscomputing
scratchfoundation/scratch-render
Apr 2018 - Mar 2021
WebGL-based rendering engine for Scratch 3.0
Role in this project:Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:1 review, 47 commits, 43 PRs in 2 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Karishma primarily contributed to the rendering engine for Scratch 3.0, focusing on the implementation of layer ordering functionality and improvements to skin rendering. Their commits added features such as layer groups for explicit and implicit layer ordering. Additionally, they made changes to support bitmap and SVG skin rendering, including the addition of methods to handle empty image data. These changes enhanced the rendering capabilities and organization of the project.
rendering-enginewebglthreejsrenderingscratch
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