Maminiaina Ravaloarison

I know the full name is really long, but I go by Mami. I’m from Madagascar and speak Malagasy, French and English. I came to the United States in 2021 to study Computer Information Systems at Monroe University, graduated in June 2025 with a minor in math, and have stayed in New York since.

These days I’m a Junior Data Analyst in Monroe’s Office of Academic Records, Assessment, and Planning. Every semester I go through more than 100 Power BI dashboards and bring them up to date, so the university can follow student performance, retention and graduation. I built my department’s SharePoint site, I’m now updating another department’s, and I’m redesigning the library’s website on LibGuides. The work is broad, and I learn a lot from it.

Outside work, I build iOS apps and small games. Right now I’m building MyTime, a SwiftUI time tracker for iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch with hand-drawn task icons and Siri to start and stop timers. I’m also making DogDuckGo, a typing game on a watercolor pond where dogs disguised as ducks swim at you. Before those, I made games you control with your hands or your nose.

I use AI to move faster, but I still edit the code and refine things myself. Coding is much more of a puzzle for me now, where I piece things together, figure out the best structure and choose the best stack. I love that this lets me focus more on my art, and on the features and setup.

As an international student I could only work on campus, first as a resident assistant and then as an IT peer tutor. So hackathons became how I got more exposure: to teamwork, since I changed teams at every single one; to new APIs from so many sponsors; and to working against a deadline on every project. I got a little obsessed, and I’ve won 12 of them at schools like Yale, Princeton, Stony Brook, Rutgers, RPI and Penn, about $4,000 in prizes.

Besides work, music is also a big part of me, and so is drawing. I started on piano as a kid, then stopped for a long time. When I was about 14 I switched to guitar, because it sounded fun, and I think back then I was also just learning to impress girls. I never took a lesson; I learned from YouTube videos and live performances. I got good at guitar, but after a while I got a little bored. Then I started to love playing walking bass lines on acoustic guitar, and then the bass in general, even though I hadn’t tried one yet. So I’d go to Guitar Center at least twice a week to play whatever bass they had in the store, and I ended up buying one. That’s when I really fell in love with it. A year after getting it I was playing gigs, and now I play regularly for the English Ministry services at NYPC.

As for drawing, it goes back to a Mickey Mouse (or maybe a Donald Duck) my mum drew on paper when I was a kid. I was blown away and wanted to recreate drawings like that, so I started drawing, and I kept at it for a long time without ever taking it seriously. It was just fun. People told me my drawings were good, but I was never satisfied; I always thought everyone else drew so much better.

Then I stopped for about five years. When I picked it up again, it was on paper first: birds, dogs, pandas. Later, at a friend’s house, I tried Procreate on an iPad and wanted to be really good at it right away, but right now I still feel terrible about my drawings on it. That’s when I decided to take every drawing more seriously and put them into the software I build. DogDuckGo is the first product of that. However bad my drawings still are, I feel like I’ve found my voice, and I want to keep it a big part of what I create, now and in the future.

I used to hate reading and writing, and now I’m pushing myself to do both (the blog here is part of that). I’m trying to cook healthy, though I’m still working on making that habit stick. These days I take care of my body less at the gym and more with walking, running, push-ups, abs and bodyweight squats. I also love dogs, chess, video games, the beach, the sun and Malibu.

As for what’s next, it’s either more school or work where what I build does some good and makes a real change in the world, rather than just being about me and my drawings. For now, I’m looking for a master’s program and scholarships.