Rachel Fenichel
Director Of Blockly at Raspberry Pi Foundation
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top School
Top expert inFont and Web Development Technologies
Rachel Fenichel is a software leader with a decade of experience building and evolving visual programming tools, currently directing Blockly at the Raspberry Pi Foundation after a tenure as a Staff Software Engineer at Google. She combines front-end craftsmanship and full-stack refactoring expertise, notably modernizing Blockly’s rendering engine to ES6 classes and designing custom renderers and connection shapes used across the open-source project. Based in San Francisco, Rachel bridges product and engineering, improving testing infrastructure and example tooling to make Blockly easier to extend and adopt. Her background in computer science from Stanford and a master’s in education informs a practical focus on developer experience and learnability in block-based coding platforms. An active contributor to high-profile repos like google/blockly and scratch-blocks, she has a track record of turning complex rendering problems into elegant, reusable abstractions.
11 years of coding experience
Master's degree Education, Master's degree Education at San Francisco State UniversityBachelor of Science - BS Computer Science, Bachelor of Science - BS Computer Science at Stanford University
Github Skills (14)
typescript10
blockly10
s610
javascript10
refactoring10
typescripts10
front-end-development10
refactor10
typescript-types10
architecture9
architectures9
unit-testing9
html7
angular4
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
RaspberryPiFoundation/blockly-samples
Nov 2019 - Jan 2023
Plugins, codelabs, and examples related to the Blockly library.
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:304 reviews, 315 commits, 335 PRs in 3 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Rachel's commits primarily focused on implementing custom renderers and connection shapes within the Blockly library. They modified and added JavaScript code to define new visual elements for connections, including rounded and rectangular shapes. The changes involved modifying HTML and JavaScript files to integrate and test the new renderer features, demonstrating a focus on extending and customizing Blockly's rendering capabilities. These commits also included improvements to the example code and comments.
blockly
RaspberryPiFoundation/blockly
Jan 2016 - Nov 2022
The web-based visual programming editor.
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:20 releases, 943 reviews, 1871 commits in 6 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Rachel primarily worked on the refactoring and migration of the core Blockly rendering engine to a new class-based structure using ES6 features. Their contributions involved converting existing code, such as field definitions and connection types, to use ES6 classes, which streamlined the code base. Additionally, the user was responsible for improving the testing infrastructure by creating a more flexible system for running and verifying tests.
visual-programming
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