She is, no doubt, amongst the most eminent representatives of the Hacking movement. To me, it’s extremely impressive though how one of the leaders of this revolution is coming right from outside the technological world and actually has a communication sciences and film college background. When I asked her to tell me a brief recap of her experience of hacking, she gave a really insightful and detailed story.

Catarina’s first contacts with electronics and programming was at ITP-NYU in 1998:

open source is not just for hackers and startups. A new class of innovative, widely adopted technologies has emerged from the open source culture of collaboration and sharing — turning the old model of replicating proprietary software as open source projects on its head. Think Git, D3, Storm, Node.js, Rails, Mongo, Mesos or Spark.

A /drupalgive page highlights the great work that your organization is doing for the Drupal project. Not only does your organization receive credit for the work you do, but we also nudge other organizations to give back as well. I expect that employees and potential hires from non-contributing organizations will start demanding to give back. This initiative gives those folks something to point to when advocating and educating inside their organization.

a high-level interpreted language, primarily intended for numerical computations. It provides capabilities for the numerical solution of linear and nonlinear problems, and for performing other numerical experiments. It also provides extensive graphics capabilities for data visualization and manipulation. Octave is normally used through its interactive command line interface, but it can also be used to write non-interactive programs. The Octave language is quite similar to Matlab so that most programs are easily portable.

I think open source software is the current pinnacle of human achievement.

Millions of man hours of remote, global collaboration and development to create an enterprise scale software stack containing implementations of all significant (and not so significant) application types and it's free for anyone in the world to use and learn from.

Amazing technological breakthroughs are being made all the time and very, very many of them (The Internet for example) have been made possible through the availability of free, high quality software.