Vada Karlen Email & Phone Number

Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States

- Directly mentoring students in React, PostgreSQL, and Node, coaching them through debugging, answering their questions, and providing support on their journey to becoming Engineers. - Reviewing students’ coding assignments and provide constructive feedback to further their learning, including assisting in refining the scopes for their upcoming final projects.

Remote

- Scaled and maintained a real-time pricing analytics dashboard with a cross-functional team at a rapidly growing start-up. Created consistently reliable full-stack features using React, Typescript, and Scala that utilized a massive historical dataset collected from weekly scrapers.- Planned out new features, breaking down epics into concisely detailed and achievable stories. Leveraged pre-tech experience to critically look at and identify unseen edge cases early on, ensuring that features would accurately fulfill customer needs. - Reviewed pull requests daily, providing useful feedback before code was merged. Updated technical documentation, removing knowledge gaps for future developers.

- Collaborated with a client to train Google DialogFlow AI in taking natural speech commands for hearing aids. Analyzed production data to find additional phrases from users to continually improve accuracy for all 40 intents across 18 languages.

- Built customized WordPress websites for local businesses, synthesizing my client's ideas into a cohesive design that accurately represents their brand. Employed a CMS to ease future site management and SEOs to improve site traffic.- Utilized WCAG guidelines and trained my client on them to ensure accessibility for all customers.

Canomiks Dashboard — github.com/vkarlen/Canomiks-Dashboard A dashboard for Canomiks, a company that tests and certifies the biological efficacy of CBD, to effectively streamline the testing process and simplify communication with their customers. - With a small remote team and a UX prototype, we planned, scoped, and built out a fully working dashboard over a 2-week sprint for a real-world client. - My primary focus during this project was the customer-facing displays, AWS S3 Cloud implementation, and directing the overall cohesiveness of our code. Further, I trained our client on setting up their own AWS account with IAM users for the project hand-off. - Technologies used: JavaScript, React, Redux, AWS S3, PostgreSQL, Express, Node, Material-UISniffer — github.com/vkarlen/Sniffer A full-stack web app designed to help the average pet parent manage their dog's food allergies and connect them with foods that fit their pup's specific needs. - Sniffer is a passion project that bridges a major gap in the pet industry, greatly reducing the frustration and hours spent by pet parents when dealing with food allergies. Personally scoped out all functions, views, and user stories to assess what could be completed within a two-week sprint. - Built out a search function that filters out specific allergens and a comparison tool to help the user quickly identify overlapping allergens in two foods. Additionally, there is a robust admin portal for adding and managing food in the database that handles all of the backend organization. - Technologies used: JavaScript, React, Redux, PostgreSQL, Express, Node, Material-UI

Cottage Grove, Minnesota, United States

- Entered large-scale pet food orders, managing time, and prioritized accounts to meet daily deadlines to ensure that stores received their orders in a timely fashion. - Worked directly with retail customers, prioritizing urgent needs and offering rapid solutions. - Navigated the shift from in-office to remote and continued to work efficiently and effectively while collaborating with my team.

Mahtomedi, Minnesota, United States

- Researched and analyzed sales for all 48 stores across 4 regions and adjusted inventory accordingly. Acted as the corporate liaison for 18 of these stores, solving any issues that arose. - Oversaw company-wide, weekly physical inventories. Followed up with stores and other departments on excessive discrepancies. Summarized and published the results.- Engineered key projects for the rebranding of our company while on loan to the Marketing Department, and utilized a style guide to redesign outdated coupons, signage, merchandise, and other branded items. - Trained to fill in across all other department tasks.

Mahtomedi, Minnesota, United States

- Navigated a fast-paced store and grooming environment, balancing excellent customer service and store functions on a daily basis.- Worked directly with customers to meet their needs. Constantly sought further research to keep up with an evolving industry. Clarified complex concepts for both customers and coworkers. - Organized and conducted events. Coordinated multi-rescue, multi-vendor in-store events as well as played an integral part in the success of large corporate events.

Full Stack Software Engineering Certification, Full Stack Software Development

Activities and Societies: Public Speaking, Career Development, DEI, Group Sprints, Meetups with other Programmers and UXers- Completed.

Computer Science

- Enrolled in the Computer Science program, learning JavaScript and HTML.