Vanessa is Chief Architect at Croquet Corporation, building a javascript-based collaborative authoring environment inspired by Smalltalk and using similar concepts as the Squeak-based Croquet from the early 2000s. Vanessa used to be a free-lancing software developer based in Magdeburg, Germany, working for Alan Kay's Viewpoints Research Institute for a dozen years. Previously, she has worked at impara, a small German company creating educational software and games using Squeak. In a former life, Vanessa was a scientist at the University of Magdeburg, Germany. Her research field was interactive 3D computer graphics and non-photorealistic rendering. However, Smalltalk is her favorite development environment.