About me

I'm a software engineer, working for the DFINITY Foundation, building developer tools for the Internet Computer Protocol. I identify as genderqueer and use they/them pronouns, and am married to an awesome partner 🥰 who works for the city of SF.

In my spare time, I enjoy exploring Golden Gate Park, and I've volunteered as an educator for Code Tenderloin. I've contributed to civic projects at Code for San Francisco, where I've built https://tenantprotections.org in collaboration with the Tech Equity Collaborative, in order to help tenants understand how California's latest laws affect tenants. I also worked on a bike lane violation app at app.lanebreach.org and some small efforts for the Open Transit project.

I grew up in Walnut Creek and went to college in Illinois where I studied Political Science and Philosophy. My partner and I met in Oxford while studying abroad, and we moved back to the bay area in 2015.

After spending a semester studying Law at UC Davis, I dropped out to spend six months learning to code at Galvanize, a programming bootcamp.

Since then, I worked at two marketing agencies, Organic and AKQA, where I built pages for Wells Fargo and Audi USA, where I re-skinned the My Audi experience. I spent a brief contract at Splunk before moving on to Cuyana.

Most recently, I spent 2020 working at Coas in the inbYou know how it be though asmixing it upe building internal tools and working on accessibillity updates to their website.

So, what's my deal?

To me, coding is a trade skill, and less of an identity. There are plenty of fun and interesting puzzles to solve in applying technology, but that's always been less interesting to me than questions about how we relate to each other and what leads to human flourishing.

To that end, I've found that I keep coming back to a few things so far, as I'm building my career. The web is a fantastic tool for telling stories and connecting people, and it was well-designed to be accessible to people by default. As applications get more complicated, though, we tend to overlook and accidentally exclude people who access the web differently from how we do. That's led me to listen and learn from experts on how to build things to always be accessible by default, and to keep listening as better approaches are introduced.

I've also found that art and storytelling are intrinsically motivating to me. Equipping someone with the ability to bring their photography or copywriting to be shared with the world is always exciting. Music, art, and sharing information are all at the core of what I think can make the internet a beautiful place, and I was raised to be a guest who always tries to leave a place nicer than how I found it.