My father is a computational engineer, so I was exposed to computers at a very young age . It all started out when I was 4 years old. My father was on the Grasshopper Forum searching for new updates, whilst I was sitting next to him; watching his screen intently. Then, I saw the Honeybee icon and I asked, “What is that?” My father answered me, explaining to me what it was. I looked at him and exclaimed, “Bees aren’t yellow!” This made an idea sprout in my father’s mind and he wrote to Mostapha ; together we created a fitting color scheme and the Honeybee icon was adjusted. From that day onwards, not only was I pleased, but I also had new stickers on my computer to celebrate the success.

You might be wondering why I was so shocked with the colour of the honeybee. The reason was that, before that time, I had already spent a lot of time with bees ; since my father was a beekeeper before he became an engineer. We would always go to an apiary for the holidays, where I learnt quite a lot about these amazing creatures. I marked queen bees, "rescued" them from the lake, ate a lot of honey and made waxed candles. I really enjoyed melting the wax, and waited in anticipation to see how the candles would turn out.

Roughly, at that time in my father’s office, located in Berlin, there was a commotion going on, about how Revit and BIM are not suited for Germany and, that, you should use AutoCAD instead. People said that Revit is too hard, and that AutoCAD is just generally better. He wanted to convince his coworkers, that this wasn't the case, so, he asked me if I wanted to build the house of my dreams, and also furnish it. I was dumbstruck, as any child would be in my age, and agreed at once. Over the weekend, I built and furnished my dream house with a little help from my father. When my father came back to the office on Monday, he had a presentation on Revit. At the end of it he said, “You can do it, if my 4-year-old daughter can”. From that moment onwards, Revit started being used.

When I was 5 years old, an architect made a workshop in our Kindergarten and we made our own cardboard houses . When I got home, my father saw my work and asked me if I wanted to see how different animals around the world would feel in my house. Initially, I did not fully understand what he meant, but agreed anyways. He used Ladybug Tools in Grasshopper (Rhino) in order to explain to me the different positions of the sun throughout the day and even the year. Together, we did a sun path analysis on my prototype in different climate regions .

Since I had so much fun doing this mini-project, my father thought that, programming would be the right thing for me. That's how I started out with Scratch , a program that seemed like a game to me.
I would spend a lot of my time working on creating new games, and thus, without my knowledge, getting a head start into the computational world.

Soon, I found out about Python , a fun and beginner-friendly programming language. It grabbed my attention immediately since it was easy to use, but capable of achieving greater things. Quickly, I completed a course on it on Sololearn to deepen my knowledge about it. This was a huge accomplishment for me then, and still means a lot to me now. Thanks to this course I forever hold some Python knowledge - although I need to refresh it once in a while.

Some years go by, and my father started working with Theo on a Ladybug Tools Spider gbXML Viewer. And guess what? I played the very important role of recording the user guides videos! It was a very fun process, even though it was difficult at times, yet now when I look back at it; I am still impressed and proud of what I created.

My father showed me the GitHub desktop app and Git Bash- since, at the time, he was doing a tutorial about them. To his surprise, I found Git Bash way easier than the desktop app, and to this day I primarily use Git Bash. He said that a lot of people in his work complained about Git Bash being too hard. So, he thought that he will show it to me and I would decide whether it was too hard or just right. In my eyes I thought of it as a new programming language, and a new challenge and therefore a chance to do something interesting, whereas in the desktop app you just have to click a few buttons...

At the beginning of 7th grade, I was surprised and very pleased to be invited to PARAMETRIA . This was a course where instructors focused on teaching about parametric design, digital manufacturing and product development. Each week, you would focus on a new project with an instructor, design your product in Grasshopper and manufacture it at the end. It was an amazing experience which gave me the opportunity to witness the process of how an idea of a product ends up in a shop being sold. I was at the part of the course which focused on parametric façades and was led by Mateusz Zwierzycki . We were creating a Parametric Responsive Facade that would, in summer, block the sunlight to protect the building from overheating, whilst in winter allow the sunlight to enter the room in order to heat it.
We started the course with brainstorming and prototyping ideas on paper in order to think of a design which would allow the sunlight to come in or would block it, depending on the weather. The next step was to program this in Grasshopper.Then, in order to decrease the time of the code, as well as to improve it, we translated these components to C# code. At the end we manufactured the façade by laser cutting the cardboard and making the frame out of wood. And the end result was so cool!

This was a totally new experience for me and I was surprised that you could program all of this in Grasshopper (Rhino)! Before this, I never thought it was possible to use a program that I knew, to design and fabricate an actual object/product... This really revolutionised the way I thought of programs and computer programming languages. It also made me very determined to learn more about Rhino and Grasshopper, and even C#, in order to be able to do all of this one day by myself.

Then in 7th grade from the 27th until the 31st of January 2020, I had an internship at McNeel Europe S.L. in Barcelona. This was an amazing experience ! The people in the office were very open and welcoming, I was surprised that they were so nice to me. Also, the office had a strong community, as everybody knew each other and always helped one another. Before this, I thought that during the internship I would have maybe half an hour of programming and the rest of the time I would be bringing them coffee, cleaning, etc. At least that's what my teacher told me I would be doing. Yet, when I got there, I was constantly programming, 3D printing or learning something new! I was overjoyed, and it was awesome ;)
I had 2 projects that I worked on during the internship,the first one was to 3D print a Chernobyl powerplant model, and the second was to start working on a snapping to grid program. In order to print the Chernobyl model: first, I had to find an original blueprint with measurements of the powerplant, second, I built it in Grasshopper, and, at the end, I used Topologic in order to make sure it generated a water-tight model. Then, what remained was to export it to the format of the 3D printer. The rest of the internship I was trying to develop a program that would accept any 2D geometry and snap it to a grid.
This experience also showed me what it would look like to work as programmer in a software development company and the only thing I can say is, "I want to work like that as well!"

However, this wasn't the last time I would hear from the wonderful Barcelona team... We were in contact after the internship, and they were always very excited to share with me some new ideas or opportunities. One of them was the C# level 3 online training course from Mr. Long Nguyen . I would have never believed that I would be given an opportunity to join such an advanced, and exciting course. The things that were covered were mind-blowing and really cool; it also motivated me to keep on programming! Furthermore, it was very interesting for me to witness an online workshop in which people from all around the world were present. And I must admit that in some coffee breaks I had interesting conversations ;)

During the beginning of Corona (in March 2021), I was doing online schooling like the rest of the schools in Germany. The reason behind this is because the government wanted to take safety precautions against the Coronavirus, so schools were closed for 3 weeks. This was very appealing for me since I could spend more time programming and try out the concept of homeschooling, which I always wanted to do! :)

Also, during COVID the amazing Rhino Barcelona Team provided me with a C# course, "Essential Guide to C# Scripting for Grasshopper" by Rajaa Issa. This course was fabulous and really helped me to understand what a beautiful language C# really is. Before this course, I understood that it was a powerful language though I deemed it unnecessairly long and complicated... However, now Ms.Issa opened my eyes to what this language actually is and I strongly beleive that she can also convince many other poeple to use this language and to make them finally understand how this language functions and how to use it!

I uploaded a new video about how to create a model based on 2D geometry that you can also push to Revit, TAS and Honeybee. This is based on a problem that I found on Rhino Discourse . I hope you enjoy it! Please share your opinions and feedback!

Then, came 9th grade, and with it another internship opportunity. This time I wanted to try something new, something I had never tried before, and something that really interested me. It sounded fun and interesting and I was excited about it, and also, I was starting to think about studying this topic at university. Therefore, I contacted Micropsi Industries , a company which focuses on training robots to do specialised tasks. I must say, I am proud of the incredible things I did there. I had an amazing person, that took care of me, a mentor per se, his name was Can. He got me started on my project, which was training a deep learning model which would in the end effect be able to recognize whether an object is in a certain position (facing upwards or downwards). This is a real life project that they got, and also quite useful in a factory setting, e.g. if it is facing upwards screw the object together, if not then turn it around and screw it together.
I also got to play around with the robot , that they load their code into! It was so cool! And that's when I knew that I could work in this field in the future!
First, I started by building my model using a technique called transferflow. This basically means that as the base I was using an already existing model, MobileNetV2 (created by Google), and fine tuning it-- tweaking it to fit my needs. I followed a tutorial, where the example followed the differentiation of a cat or dog, but since it was basically what I wanted to do (the same process only other images), my mentor thought it would be a good introduction for me to the topic of deep learning. There, I also learnt a lot about the images needed for training our model, and how data augmentations is a very critical process, since otherwise we wouldn't have enough images. I had no idea how much training and testing data a machine learning model needs! My model also created graphs to show me if it was overfitted or underfitted, so that I could tweak my number of epochs (number of times it was looking at the images, in order to find a pattern) to reach the highest level of accuracy.
This is how I trained my model, and saved it. Next, I was given videos of the machine "looking" at my object. So, I had to write a program to extract the images out of it, so take each frame out of the videos. Then I had to give these images into my model, and wait for the outcome. My mentor, then took it even a step further, we connected a camera to my computer and it differentiated it in real time. Afterwards, just to make it even more fun, we connected this to the robot , and it also worked! I managed to do a project, that an actual client asked them to do! I was and am still so proud of what I managed to accomplish. If somebody would have told me this before, I would have never believed them.

And then, came the next opportunity for me... The BILT Europe conference in Valencia from the 14-16th of November 2022. A simply thrilling adventure I got to experience.
This exhilarating venture, was waiting for me since 2020, but unfortunately, COVID changed our plans... But maybe, it was for the better, maybe, thanks to that we presented better than we could have ever presented before ;) There is always a reason for everything!
I was lucky enough to have the chance to meet so many people from different fields. At the beginning it was hard to get used to talking to strangers, as I am not the most extroverted person (I needed to get used to it). However, everbody was open and only offered a great experience and an interesting conversations, so that I only have the best of memories in that regard.
Looking back now, I think that one of my highlights must have been the first day, during the introduction, when they told all speakers to stand up, and on the screen in front, all of our companies were shown- for me however it was my school :) Afterwards, I was lucky enough to listen to a lecture on robotic autonomy and I was impressed with the technology we are creating nowadays!
And then, on the second day, it was my turn to present: which wasn't an easy task. I wasn't used to teaching other people, in my eyes much more qualified than me, about something. I worried the whole day, however, when I started talking suddenly all of the knowledge started oozing out od my brain and the butterflies in my stomache disappeared.
Our presentation focused on building watertight models easily and efficiently, and therefore we showed the two different plugins in Grasshopper that could be used for that purpose: Topologic and SAM.
And since SAM is the product of my father's hard work, since he develops it, I felt that I could never fully match his knowledge of it. Therefore, I decided that I would take the part on Topologic. And everything started from that point on. I started researching and reading everything I could find on that topic and even ended up contacting Topologic's founders: Prof Aish and Prof. Jabi. And they provided endless support to my neverending questions. In this process, I also came up with another idea, why not create my own video series which introduces Topologic to beginners? It would be fun to make, and maybe, people could learn something from it... And this is how the Topologic mini-series came to life! So please check it out and don't forget to leave any feedback ;)

Thanks to all of your support, my mini series had begun to attract attention, as well as the interest of the Rhino team. As they are always eager to embark on new adventures, they were so kind as to offer me a chance of getting featured in Rhinozine . I am so grateful to have had the opportunity of participating in the amazing September 2023 issue ! Not only does it mention new exciting projects made in Rhino, but also it introduces cool new Plug-ins!