Amy (Boone) Fermanian is a software engineer with interest in the intersection of clothing, sustainability, and tech. She has spent the last 10+ years building scalable systems at LinkedIn, MM.LaFleur, Rent the Runway, and EnergyHub. She’s been attending SCALE with her father since she was a teenager and feels strongly about supporting the open source community. Outside of tech, she is a passionate sewist of 20+ years and, in the last few years, has started taking formal courses in topics such as patternmaking and textile science.

Presentations

23x

Warp, Weft, and Code: Textiles as the Hidden Foundation of Computation

What do looms, Linux, and open-source communities have in common? More than you might think. This talk uncovers the surprising computational depth of textiles where patterns function like algorithms, fabrics behave like data structures, and some of the earliest programmable machines were built.

Attendees will leave with a new understanding of how deeply computation is rooted in craft and why the cultural values of repairability, transparency, and user modification link weavers and open-source developers across centuries. If you’ve ever wanted to see computation from a completely different angle, this talk will change how you think about both craft and code.

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