About the Author

Jessica Ingrassellino is a multi-talented educator, business leader, and technologist. She received her EdD from Teachers College, Columbia University for music education with an emphasis on assessment.

Jessica is currently employed as the lead software engineer in testing at Bitly, New York City. She transitioned from a teaching career of 10 years to a technology career through a balance of freelance work and social media exposure. Jessica's current work focuses on using Python to develop automated testing tools. She is an ASTQB certified quality assurance engineer with experience in testing web, mobile, and backend applications.

In addition to working at Bitly, Jessica remains committed to education and has founded http://www.teachcode.org/, a nonprofit that teaches computer programming skills to teachers and students in urban or underserved populations through Python and 2D game programming. This new initiative will give teachers the support they need through a standards-referenced curriculum, student-engaging activities, and access to experts in the field of technology.

I would like to thank my students for allowing me to have such fun teaching them Python and learning from their experiences as new programmers. I would also like to thank Cathy Kross and Alice McGowan for being willing to have me in their classes and school and interrupting their daily lives with my code-teaching experiments. Finally, I would like to thank my husband, Nick, for believing in me and helping me through some major writer's block. He never loses faith in me, and for that, I am eternally grateful.