Danielle Honigstein

I actually didn’t know what programming was before I arrived at university. I knew since I was 8 that I wanted to be a physicist, because I asked a lot of questions, and at some point I started asking “What do I need to learn to know the answer to this question…?” and the answer was always “Physics”. And in high school (only girl out of 11 in physics ) I discovered lasers.

Lasers are cool.

lots of interference patterns — Interference of two circular waves for different wavelengths. ref:Wikipedia.

So obviously I wanted to learn physics. I considered Physics and Music, but in the end I decided on Physics and Computer Science, because I figured programming would be very useful as a physicist. And slowly I became more and more hooked.

The epiphany came somewhere in the middle of my PhD in Applied Physics. I had been working as a programmer for a few years by then, and after spending roughly 3 months aligning the *@#$ system for my experiment in physics I realized that I actually enjoy programming more. You get a result so fast. It might not be the result you want, but at least you get feedback quickly. And you can create almost anything, from a mobile app for research to an abstract video.

So I started working as a physicist and programmer, and then I programmed for physicists, and now I’m programming for (mostly) neurobiologists at the Olfaction Lab at the Weizmann Institute of Science.

I also play sing and play the piano. I have some songs in YouTube, most of them with videos at least partially done in Processing. The site also has p5.js sketches, all my sketches are free for commercial and personal use with attribution (BSD 3-clause license).

I’m also a (mostly) mobile programmer at Sniff Logic, where we turn nasal airflow into communication and information.

I taught Computer Science at a high school for two years, and I loved teaching. When I’ll have the time for it I will probably go back to it.

I’m married with 3 awesome kids.

I program in Flutter, Android (Java), Swift, Drupal (HTML, JavaScript, css, PHP, yml), LabVIEW, Matlab, Arduino (C), Python, Processing (Java), Unity, C (for embedded firmware) and I probably forgot something .

In this blog I’ll highlight anything that strikes me as interesting. Come join me, we’ll have fun.