Learned about both 1) the existence of and 2) how to use... electronic tape dispensers and pallet jacks! I helped pack, tape, ship, and lovingly wave goodbye to hundreds of boxes of CNC router kits for the folks over at https://www.maslowcnc.com/. They're doing amazing work - check them out!

My career break has afforded me the wonderful opportunity to prioritize my mental and physical health, travel across the world, center my relationships with family and friends, and re-evaluate what I need in a career. One fun highlight was building a bike that I took on a two-month camping adventure across Slovenia and Switzerland. Ask me for more details about any of this - I'd love to share!

I supported Meta's in-house programming language, Hack, and learned all sorts of interesting tidbits about typechecking, parsing, and IDEs. My favorite project - from all my years at the company - was leading the investigation of large-scale database anomalies and collaborating with many smart people to determine addressing these anomalies (deleting resource-intensive server requests) would be catastrophic or go unnoticed (usually the latter).

My first job out of school! I developed features for the "Login with Facebook" flow you see on third-party sites like Spotify and otherwise supported the team organizing test development sessions to address oncall issues and bug bashes to ensure feature parity across mobile and web platforms. My biggest piece of independent work included writing a comprehensive test suite for an "anonymous login" proof of concept to prove its viability in protecting sensitive user data and providing technical expertise during the design process.

As a solo violinist and a member of various chamber music ensembles, I performed at formal events, small concerts, and pit orchestra gigs, representing organizations like the Empire State Youth Orchestra and the Binghamton University music department. As a private lesson teacher, I created personalized lesson plans for students of varying ages and abilities and provided instruction on technique, musicianship, instrument care, and music theory.

I got to build a sub-15 MB Android "instant app” from scratch fully encompassing the Facebook mobile app user registration flow - just to prove it would work! I also became familiar with Facebook's A/B analysis tools and led some of my experiments (aimed at boosting user acquisition and retention metrics) all the way from brainstorm to actually shipping.

Who among us has not been a teacherly figure? That at least was the reasoning behind my foray into the classroom setting. I learned that I enjoy helping students who come to me venting about assignments (interesting) but not grading papers (uninteresting).

By this time, I was a computer science major (also of dubious nature) so I was able to do more things, like implement proofs of concept in the Java and C# codebases and understand with more clarity exactly how much I didn't know.

I was a chemistry major (of dubious nature) at this time so I mostly just dug around in the Google Maps API and taught myself basic Javascript. I helped build a tool that my manager's manager used interactively when doing sales pitches for WIND TURBINES!