Valerie became involved in the Debian's Reproducible Builds effort as a direct result of discovering Outreachy, a Google Summer of Code-like internship for women and minorities. A long time enthusiast and user of Debian, she applied and was awarded funding to work on the Debian reproducible builds effort in May 2016. Her first project was contributing to test.reproducible-builds.org/debian, the website that surface results from tests for build reproducibility of all Debian packages. She is now a regular contributor to Debian and the reproducible builds effort. Valerie also serves the Free Software Community from her position on the board of directors of Software in the Public Interest, Inc.

Previous to Debian work, Valerie worked on a Electronic Medical Record webapp (closed source) for two years, and before that was a student of Computer Science and Physics at Boston University. At BU, she co-founded the hackerspace BUILDS.cc, a space for interdisciplinary technical collaborations between students, where she was first introduced to Debian and the free software movement.