Software Engineer, Oakland, CA
Website
The Fellowship is a service-year program where civic-minded developers, designers, and product managers create small startup teams and partner with a local government for a year-long collaboration. We work together to build apps, foster new approaches to problem solving throughout City Hall, and tackle issues the community is facing.
My favorite job to date. I have the pleasure of working with a highly collaborative, friendly bunch of people. It's self-directed and chaotic but always, always fun. Visit our end of year report for project specifics. Or check out Team Denver's page on Code for America's website.
Founded Anchorage's brigade for Code for America. I was inspired by Anchorage's amazing Chief Technology Officer, Lance Ahern, when he motivated us to join the Race for Reuse, which we won.
GitHub Repo
Rails app to support the Bicycle Commuters of Anchorage's Commuter Challenge. After trying several online tools that didn't fit their scoring needs, the Bicycle Commuters of Anchorage resorted to tracking participation in a spreadsheet in the summer of 2012. With a partner, I started this application for the summer of 2013. 2014's competition supports 993 users and counting!
Website
Co-founded Anchorage's organization to promote women in technology. We taught beginning programming concepts for free to all women who were interested. I feel strongly that programming should be as pervasive as writing skills. We targeted our classes to a broad range of skill levels. As my cofounder and I have both left Alaska, the organization is now defunct
This decent sized local consulting company taught me about GIS and how to work in a distributed team.
This small startup taught me self-reliance and how to be a jack of all trades. Custom CMS maintenance? (Who makes a custom cms?) I did it. Custom Drupal module? If you insist. Pick your own technology tutoring site? Ok, rails it is. Hospital accounting data aggregator? Ever heard of DataFlex? I think you get the picture.
I primarily worked on a native windows application that enabled users to track expenses on projects. It was a hail mary application for a company that was not doing so hot financially. They were sure the application would help get their project expenses on track. It was the first spectacular software failure I was a part of.