Hi Steem!

Hi everyone, my name is Gayle Madeira. I just joined and am very excited about this revolutionary new platform.

I grew up in Virginia just outside of Washington DC but have been living in NYC since 1992. My father worked at the Library of Congress during my childhood. He was the foremost authority on the U.S. Government's role in the Vietnam War and was commissioned by them to write 5 volumes on the topic. You can read more on the website I made for him: http://www.williamconradgibbons.com/ Here is a great old photo of him with Lyndon Johnson in the background (he's the one standing):

I'm an odd combination of dancer, painter, and computer scientist. The path to these 3 fields is a winding one. I started dancing when I was 5 years old - ballet first and then modern as well. For college, I went to a conservatory for dance and when I graduated in 1992, I didn't want to be a waitress. I heard there were jobs in the investment banks (in NYC) where you could work any time of the day or night. I wanted to work at night so I could dance during the day. The jobs were on the computer but they didn't even have windows yet. We had to type the code to change fonts, etc. I was sent to be a temp at Goldman Sachs and for 12 years, I danced during the day and worked as a temp at night and on weekends. I was able to go away and dance with many dance companies, and I had my own dance company as well.

This is me performing in Amsterdam in 1991 with my friend Michael:

This is me performing in a dance company called "Shapiro and Smith" around 1996:

While I was working at Goldman in between dance tours, I decided that during the times when there was no work, I wanted to practice the same energy as I would when dancing or painting so instead of reading a book, I taught myself basic VBA code. I made shortcuts to the things we did in our department, then rolled them out to other people who also wanted shortcuts. I documented them so that people would know how to use them. I didn't realize that I was making my own little development environment! When I was in my 30s, I decided to take a job at Merrill Lynch. It was still consulting but I had to work during the day instead of at night, and it was in a real development group. I wanted to keep dancing, so I decided to start taking Argentine tango, something I'd always wanted to learn. After a couple of years of lessons and hard work, a well-known leader in the community asked me if I'd like to compete in the U.S. Tango Championship with her. I thought it would be good practice to get ready for it and also thought it would be interesting to compete with 2 women. We competed in 2008 and we won first place in the stage category! Here is a photo of us performing:

Two years later, I competed again with a man named Sidney Grant and we won first place in the salon category! Sid has a wonderful company called Ballroom Basix that teaches ballroom to inner city schoolchildren. We decided to donate all our prize money to his company. Here we are together after winning:

In the meantime, I had stayed at Merrill Lynch for 3 years as a consultant and learned everything about the SDLC and had a really great time with my developer co-workers, but in 2007 I decided to move on to work as a software tester at a little start up called TZero which was an offshoot company created by a derivatives company called Creditex in order to create a tool to automate their credit default swap trades. The name was due to the fact that we automated the trades in zero time. We were the only company to do this, and in 2008 all the big banks were mandated to automate those trades. Of course, at the end of that year was the big crash, but our company was bought by a big exchange - InterContinental Exchange - just a month before the crash. We ended up being very busy because of the new regulations, and I was made the manager of my team after the first 3 years, and spent 2 more years at the company in that role. I was very focused on the job but I was also quite silly. Here's a picture of me with my hair over my face and my glasses on - classic on-the-job hijinks:

Even though I was very busy with all the dancing and computer work, that whole entire time I was also painting and drawing! I loved to paint animals and I used watercolor paints. Here is one of the commissioned portraits I painted during that time:

After being at InterContinental Exchange for 5 years, I decided to quit and just paint and dance for a while. I went on to learn how to oil paint, and also have been working part time from home for Microsoft for the last 4 years. I still dance but mostly just socially, and I teach tango and art. Sometimes you can find me painting outside in NYC, so if you're in the city and see a small person painting in a park or on the street, come say hi because it might be me!

Here's one of my latest paintings - a man I saw on the NYC subway. It's called "Young American, February 2017"

I hope you enjoyed my introduction and I look forward to meeting many people here!
If you want to see more of my artwork, you can see it on my site: https://gaylemadeira.com/
If you want to see more about my dancing, you can see it on the site I have with my partner (in life and dance) Tioma: https://www.gayleandtioma.com/