Twitter Countdown Bot
A simple Twitter bot to countdown the days to a movie premiere. Uses the Tweepy library to access the Twitter API. Deployed and scheduled with Heroku to make daily tweets.
Melina O'Dell
Melina is a PhD student at UIUC and Software Engineer at Verkada. Her research interests are at the intersection of CS Education and HCI. She earned her Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Computer Science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Since her Master's, she has been a Software Engineer at Verkada working on the design system and frontend component library. She also has over 2 years of teaching experience for the Web Systems course at Michigan.
She is passionate about web development, teaching and education, supporting women in STEM, and perpetual learning. In her free time, she enjoys playing music, listening to tech podcasts, and learning about Emacs.
Papers
Publications
Melina O'Dell and Andrew DeOrio. American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), June 2025.
Yutong Ai, Maya Baveja, Akanksha Girdhar, Melina O'Dell, and Andrew DeOrio. American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), June 2024.
Coursework
Jeff Brill, Melina O'Dell, and Max Liu. December 2024.
Yutong Ai, Melina O'Dell, Mingye Chen, and Fanghao Zhang. April 2024.
Yutong Ai, Carter Galbus, Cooper Hickmott, Alex Morton, and Melina O'Dell. December 2023.
Julia Aoun, Chimmuanya Iheanyi-Igwe, Mariam Mahmoud, Melina O'Dell, and Sydney Swider. April 2023.
Talks and Lectures
Specialist vs. Generalist Generative AI for Student Learning (ASEE Paper Presentation)
Melina O'Dell. Montreal, QC, CA, June 2025.
Recommender Systems (EECS 485, Lecture 21)
Melina O'Dell. Ann Arbor, MI, November 2024.
Networking (EECS 485, Lecture 14)
Melina O'Dell. Ann Arbor, MI, October 2024.
A Custom Generative AI Chatbot as a Course Resource (ASEE Paper Presentation)
Melina O'Dell, Maya Baveja, and Akanksha Girdhar. Portland, OR, June 2024.
Parallel and Concurrent Programming (EECS 390 Guest Lecture)
Melina O'Dell. Ann Arbor, MI, April 2024.
Server-side Dynamic Pages (EECS 485, Lecture 3)
Melina O'Dell. Ann Arbor, MI, September 2023.
Projects
Python
Twitter API
Heroku
Personal Website
An autobiographical static site built with Astro. Styled with Fomantic UI. Hosted on GitHub Pages.
Astro
React
JavaScript
HTML
CSS
GH Pages
Dotfiles
My dotfiles! Continuously updated and filled with bash customizations, aliases, my Emacs configuration, and more.
Bash
ELisp
Unix
Course Schedule Converter
A Python program to convert my class schedule (HTML) to an iCal file to automate making calendar events.
Python
BeautifulSoup
iCal
License Manager Redesign
A redesign of the License Manager UI to improve usability and performance that enabled $100M in bookings and $100M in pipeline across 250+ enterprise customers.
React
Redux
Tanstack Query
TypeScript
Figma
Doors on Floorplans
Supporting Access Control devices (doors) on the Floorplans UI in the Verkada Command platform. Users can move, scale, and rotate door representations to match their physical space.
React
Redux
TypeScript
App Init Refactor
Refactoring the app initialization for the Verkada Command platform to improve initial load times by 90%, and updates to page speed metrics to track improvements over time.
React
Redux
TypeScript
Datadog
Search Engine Dataset Enhancements
A redesigned dataset and test suite, and a workflow to automate future dataset regeneration for the search engine project in EECS 485.
Python
SQLite
Pytest
MapReduce
Instagram Clone
A full-stack Instagram clone. Features login and user authentication, uploading images, liking, commenting, and following users.
React
Flask
JavaScript
Python
HTML
CSS
Instructor Dashboard
A full-stack dashboard to summarize and display classroom performance statistics to elementary school teachers.
Angular
Laravel
TypeScript
PHP
MySQL