Working on the application that supports Unruly Splats: helping educators teach coding through active play using programmable platforms!

After leaving FREE THE WORK as a full-timer, I returned on a contract to help with a website migration. The team was moving away from a Contentful integration which had been causing trouble due to its implementation before the current team. A lot of effort was put into syncing content with our Firebase database, however, the integration was too tightly coupled to modify easily while also missing handlers for unpublishing events in Contentful, which could cause cascading issues regarding data integrity and cause pages to go missing on the site.I created a pipeline for ingesting the Contentful data and putting it into a format that works well with Wordpress, including things like generating categories/tags in WP programmatically. We chose Wordpress because the FTW content team was most comfortable with it and it met their needs for a long-term CMS. In the end, I delivered a script that could connect to a Contentful environment and a Wordpress instance and programmatically migrate all posts and related media with proper tagging, including custom shortcodes for preserving styling patterns from the original blog.On the side, I helped out with a variety of tasks related to dashboard development as needed, which was similar to my original time there and can be read about below!

FREE THE WORK (FTW) is a non-profit organization committed to making equity actionable in media and creating opportunities for a global workforce of underrepresented creators behind the lens in TV, film, and marketing. We accomplish this goal through our FREE THE WORK pledge, global talent database, community, DEI guidance, impact & insights reporting, and educational tools that help creators to demystify the media industries.During my time as lead developer at FTW, I worked with a small team of engineers distributed across the world (NA, LATAM, APAC) and walked through technical decisions with both engineers and non-technical stakeholders. I advised on architecture planning as well as lower-level implementation details as needed with my team, keeping track of work to be scheduled for upcoming releases and communicating when and why any issues might delay updates. During my time there I reported to first the head of product before the VP of Engineering.My work centered around a talent marketplace where producers could find creators in a variety of roles related to producing film, TV, and marketing content (e.g. directors, editors, photographers). My time was split between my own individual contributions to feature work as well as overseeing the work of my teammates and ensuring that our product team was aware of any issues we hit along the way. A large amount of effort was put into planning a rework of our backend which focused on migrating away from Firebase, as we had inherited a codebase that was starting to run up against various constraints imposed by the service and how the codebase had been integrated with it. While we faced many headaches related to this integration, I'm very proud of the work we did and more proud of getting a chance to share knowledge and in turn, learn from the developers I was managing.

As a consultant at Jayway, I worked on a 3D planner for visualizing combinations of furniture for the home. The project's focus was on storage solutions, so each combination involved a set of frames that could be customized with different doors, handles, and legs. My biggest accomplishment at Jayway was working with a small team to add a brand new range of products to the planner. The UI was written in React and Redux was used for tracking selected products and their position in our 3D canvas.Additionally, I gave a talk on Redux Sagas for one of our internal knowledge-sharing days!

I managed the development of our dashboard which clients and company administrators use to configure our product as well as understand its performance.During my time there, I:- Coordinated with other team leads to organize and carry out cross-team projects. I collaborated frequently with the product team to mock up interfaces and define specifications.- Set up Continuous Integration to build images for my project that could then be deployed with the Kubernetes infrastructure created by the dev-ops team.- Maintained and updated the marketing site in Wordpress.

indico is introducing developer-first machine learning by building a development environment for faster, more effective ML projects.During my time there, I:- Developed visualizations so clients could interpret data gained from analyzing texts and images with indico’s machine learning tools.- Iterated, tested and maintained marketing site and demos including strategic planning around updates (e.g. A/B testing).- Wrote developer documentation including API usage as well as a step-by-step guide for developing applications from scratch.

During my time in the admissions office I gave tours to several hundred prospective students as well as liaisons visiting for conferences about education. The position also involved data entry and various jobs as required by my bosses.