ARIELLA BASTON

What brought you to Northern College?

Northern Ontario culture, breadth of the Computer Science program, and preferred campus location.

Tell us about your favourite Northern College experience?

LAN parties full of X-Files watching and playing Duke Nukem 3D matches with fellow students were the best!

What impact has Northern College had on your life?

My career has been centred in Software Development, and across its many disciplines like Coding, Business Analysis, Developer Relations, and Interoperability—all supported by Cloud infrastructure, various APIs, and more recently, AI/LLMs. Northern College's curriculum laid a necessary foundation of knowledge, analytical skill, data valuation and large-picture problem solving that still serve me today.

How:
The curriculum of the late 1990s program was fantastic in its breadth. While some of the technology we utilized is now out of date, the fundamentals remain. The program covered multi-user network administration, functional and object oriented programming languages, communications, algorithms and data models, discovering and implementing valuable requirements, AI fundamentals, some UX design, and database design.

I feel like I couldn't have achieved all that I have without Northern College's help shaping my I.T. disciplines. Thank you!

What are you up to now?

I'm working in I.T., focusing mostly on Cloud, Web and Mobile based software development, and in between I enjoy time spent with various communities of advocates and hobbyists for free (as in freedom) software, gaming and retro-computing. I like to plurk on my piano and synthesizer here and there, and sometimes take on writing projects.

Where are you living now?

Montréal, QC

What Northern campus did you attend?

Kirkland Lake