Karen Rustad Tolva Email & Phone Number

Mountain View, CA, US

I'm taking the user interface for the Crowdalert console and, to quote one of the founders, "mak[ing] it good".

I am the creator of Ferris the Rustacean, cute crab and semi-official mascot of the Rust Programming Language. I maintain http://www.rustacean.net, the home for Ferris's source files and fan art, and design Ferris t-shirts and stickers. I also drew the cover for the book The Rust Programming Language!

New York, NY, US

I was the first frontend hire and first employee with a design background, building the Materialize Cloud web UI almost from scratch. I took vague feature requests from stakeholders and turned what started at best as a rudimentary sketch into a polished, thought-out feature. I was the primary person giving feedback on work from our external design agency.

Redwood City, CA, US

Worked on meta.org -- tools for scientists to discover research relevant to their work!

Mountain View, California, US

I worked on HR business partner tools for demonstrating our product's value using Typescript, React, Apollo, GraphQL, and SVG-based infoviz. I made a habit of posting in-progress screenshots for early feedback and encouraged others to do so. I also worked on web performance with better chunking and content hashing of static assets using webpack. I was laid.

San Mateo, CA, US

San Francisco, CA, US

I did frontend web development on the Smart Recordset team, mostly with ReactJS and Redux. I helped ship the rewritten, scalable blueprint publishing flow, wrote the frontend for the automated submittal log, and worked on the web sheet viewer rewrite using React and TypeScript. I cofounded an ERG for families at PlanGrid and participated on two working.

Palo Alto, California, US

I was the first frontend developer and designer at a small security-focused enterprise startup. Until we hired a full-time designer, I designed the team's t-shirts and entire web product UI. I prototyped a new desktop app UI using React, flexbox, and Electron; this work became the basis for the company's pivot to a chat collaboration tool called Amium. I.

I helped lead the PyCon US Program Committee, the team responsible for soliciting, reviewing, and choosing talk proposals for PyCon US 2016 and PyCon US 2017.

Philadelphia, PA, US

As a board member, I helped apply for grants, raised money from individual donors, pursued collaboration opportunities with other nonprofit groups, represented OpenHatch at conferences, and otherwise helped grow the organization. Besides my board duties, I also served as lead designer. I drew custom sketches of Sufjan, the organization's mascot, for each.

Boulder, Colorado, US

I redesigned Least Authority's website--including front-end development, logo and graphic design, copywriting, and iterative UX improvements--in anticipation of an August product launch.

San Francisco, California, US

Worked on the Disqus.com admin interface, including settings and moderation. Led a major settings refactor to avoid code duplication and effectively use Django forms. Restyled the API documentation pages and created a demo of a comprehensive developer resources portal. Also helped build the first version of Batsense, an internal advertisement management.

I managed a team of volunteers working on art-related tasks for the MIT Mystery Hunt. I also completed a number of crucial art tasks myself, including the 2013 Hunt coin design, several logos and brand identities for fictional corporations within the Hunt, and the opening round slides. I also designed and coded a majority of the Python/Flask-based Hunt.

Berkeley, CA, US

I worked on a Django-based web application to sort and analyze qualitative data on consumer privacy complaints.

Berkeley, CA, US

I helped teach Information Organization Lab (IOLab), a class on applied web design and development involving topics including HTML5, CSS3, Javascript and JQuery, mobile development (Phonegap / JQuery Mobile), API mashing, OAuth, and Django.

I performed an early user experience audit for GNU Mediagoblin, submitted patches for a couple feature requests, helped start designing the OStatus/PubSubHubbub-based Python federation library Kuneco, and provide general design consultation. I also drew that cute goblin cartoon on http://mediagoblin.com/!

San Francisco, CA, US

I did design and coding work as part of Google Summer of Code for CfA Brigade, a Ruby on Rails-based application to help support and coordinate volunteers in doing civic hacking in their hometowns.

Berkeley, CA, US

Graded papers and tests for MS 198 - Gender and Media.

Updating and redesigning a variety of online gift e-commerce and product promotion sites, plus various graphic design tasks.

Philadelphia, PA, US

I did market research and other business development work, helped design the site user experience (including cartoons), created graphics, produced videos, wrote blog posts, presented OpenHatch to over 200 investors, entrepreneurs, and journalists at Shotput Ventures' Demo Day event, and made delicious food.

Rewrote the FAQ, processed and answered customer help requests, and filed bug reports for the developer team.

Updated website materials, created graphics, communicated with conference sponsors and SPARC allies, and coordinated, taped, and edited a viral video series.

Photographed new items, wrote product copy, kept the site inventory up-to-date, created online product promotions, and participated in general manager duties including on-call hours and weekly meetings.

Served on SFC's board, helping make strategic decisions, coordinating volunteers and campaigns, assisting with the website redesign, and spearheading writing SFC's bylaws and holding its first board elections.

US

Updated GI-Net's social networking presence, singlehandedly redesigned the 1-800-GENOCIDE campaign website and moved it to Wordpress, and ate too much Indian food.

Illustrated public domain children's stories and put them online.

Prevented youth soccer players, parents, and coaches from killing each other.

Master Of Science (Ms), Information Management And Systems

Ba, Media Studies, Politics