Emergent Works interrupts the prison cycle by creating pathways into high paying careers in technology for formerly incarcerated people. We are a nonprofit software company that trains and employs formerly incarcerated folks.

I was brought onto Gakko, a global education design studio, to open their first permanent learning space and build their technology education programs. We opened the interdisciplinary “school” in January 2018, where we subsequently hosted hackathons, after school and summer programs, conferences, and concerts. I developed the technology curricula, taught the first iteration of the classes, and hired and trained the teaching staff. I built and fostered relationships with NYC high schools, universities, tech startups, and the larger NYC technology education ecosystem to develop a sustainable pipeline of students, teachers, and events. I also advised and hired for Gakko’s Digital Learning team, which released its first iOS application, Moji Moji, in 2018.

I led the Skillshare Web engineering team, a team of 12 software engineers in charge of building and maintaining the Skillshare web application and API, both built on PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, HTML, and Sass, which served video based educational content to over 1 million users. I set the Web engineering team's yearly, quarterly, and weekly OKRs and roadmap and oversaw hiring and professional development for the team in addition to giving talks and mentoring at various software conferences around the world. As a part of those efforts, I co-founded and organized Codeshare, Skillshare's quarterly creative coding conference. I also founded and led Skillshare’s Diversity & Inclusion team.

I led the Skillshare Growth engineering team, a team of 4 software engineers responsible for Skillshare’s product growth strategy. Skillshare is an online learning platform for continuing education, serving video based educational content via a web application and various native applications (iOS, Android, AppleTV). The Growth Engineering team developed features for both the Skillshare web application and API using PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, HTML, and Sass. I led a number of high impact engineering projects including: the development of our personalized recommendations algorithm; the development of our batch email sending system, allowing us to send a list of daily recommended classes to over 1 million users.

I was hired to support the launch of Coalition for Queens’ (C4Q, now renamed Pursuit) pilot program. I led the development of the original technical curriculum for C4Q’s Access Code — a 9 month long intensive technical jobs training program for adults from low income and underrepresented backgrounds in tech. We taught iOS and Android development, compliant with the industry’s standards. Our graduates went on to work as professional mobile developers at top tier tech companies (Spotify, Kickstarter, the NYTimes) and the average income level of the students went from $20k/year pre-program to $75k/year post-program. I led the development of the Access Code educational support tools, including our learning assessment system built in both Java for Android and Objective-C for iOS, and our online grade book, built in Ruby on Rails. I led hiring and training for technical teachers, all of whom came from professional software development backgrounds.

I was the first software engineer on the U.S. team of Bloglovin’ (now Activate) — an RSS feed for lifestyle content with over 7 million users. I led the refactoring of our monolithic PHP web application into a responsive, service oriented Node application. I was responsible for maintaining and developing the front-end of the Bloglovin’ web application, which involved: the development of the custom Bloglovin’ grid layout, used across the application; browser support of our code across all major browsers; content localization, allowing users from all over the world to access the website’s content in their local language. I also evangelized our engineering team and product at technology events, meet ups, and conferences.

Graded a class of 50 students over the course of one semester.