About

I grew up in the back of small planes, as my beloved, single, working, immigrant mom ran a glider business to support us, and often my “baby sitter” was just me being strapped into the backseat of the tow-plane, often to promptly fall alseep. She’s recently passed, so my sidebar image is a photo of her performing a “wing-over” over the ski hill in my home town.

Thus, I was inculcated with a certain fearlessness from an early age, and was a competitive mogul skiier for 13 years, with ambitions of the Olympics. Most of my excitement nowadays comes from riding motorycles (my current beauty being a Triumph 1700 Thunderbird LT) and the never-ending thrill of making tests turn green (or the Rust compiler build clean). I am actually not joking; it is one of life’s most dependable dopamine hits (if perhaps not quite the same epinephrine spike).

Professionally, I have over 20 years of experience in software engineering and management, in various high-compliance sectors such as fin/ed/health/gov tech. I enjoy, and am experienced in, managing cross-functional teams and cross-team collabs as well as leading the development of high-throughput, low-latency, low-downtime systems. I particularly enjoy enabling cutting-edge science and engineering efforts with my programming skills and leadership.

As a software engineer, I am a T-shaped polyglot: I have worked with almost every widely used web production language of the last 20 years and in particular have been working primarily with Ruby on Rails (and of course Javascript) for most of that time. My current other favorites include Rust, which I’m using for a side-project dealing with 80s game file formats (eventually I plan to rebuild an engine for Ultima 1-3) and the intersection of WebComponents and WebAssembly as an alternative to the direction we’ve gone overbuilding React, et al in the last decade. I’m also one of those weirdos who likes maintaining and improving other people’s code, infrastructure, and CI/CD pipelines.

As a queer trans woman, I strongly believe that diverse teams yield better results. In leadership roles, I strive to bring unique perspectives and prioritize creating a safe, communicative environment while also setting high team expectations. I believe in servant leadership and empowering my team to make the right decisions. I have a track record of addressing performance issues without resorting to punitive measures (a rare skill in tech), and I work hard to earn loyalty, which significantly improves team cohesion and retention.

I am an autodidact with a passion for learning, which began at a young age. When I wasn’t immediately alseep on those plane rides, I was teaching myself to read (by the age of 2 1/2) from author read-along tapes of the Serendipity books. I taught myself to program at 8 years old from type-in programs in computing magazines, and continue my love of teaching myself new skills to this day.

In high school I developed plans to save the world with nanotechnology (the 90s were an ambitious era); thanks Eric K. Drexler for the interesting tangent. My O-Chem course, an internship, and the described realities of actual chemical engineering work led me to return to computing, where I have happily spent my time and energy since. The rapid advancements in biotech and AI of the last decade provide intriguing promise of those interests dovetailing again and I am excited to see what comes next.