About Me
I once helped a group of pilots negotiate entry across the Syrian border by serving as their on the fly Arabic interpreter.
In college I signed up for creative writing, but dropped after the second session when my classmates spent the whole time critiquing short story characters as “unrealistic” by which they apparently meant “containing literally any positive or altruistic traits”. The thought of spending a semester surrounded by that kind of cynicism was unbearable to me.
When interviewing with a former manager early in my career, he wanted to know why I was leaving a job despite ascertaining that I was basically a one-woman-show (which he thought most engineers would love - I deployed multiple times a day! No code reviews!). I reflected and replied: “If you charged me to build a software system from scratch, and I could do it alone in a quiet office or in a classroom full of teenagers who have never written a line of code - and the only constraint is I should pick the setting I think will result in the best software at the end of one year - I would pick the classroom full of untrained teenagers.” More than a decade of experience later, I still think that’s true. I also think that it says a lot about the qualities I value most in software and the groups that can be assembled to build it.
Despite that unorthodox choice, I enjoy building software much more than managing people. I am, however, an excellent first follower.
Experience
I’ve worked at a bunch of startups and small companies as a full stack engineer who in reality almost exclusively works on backend systems. Way before that, I was a high school teacher of world languages and other subjects. In college, I thought I was going to be an international lawyer in the area of human rights.
Preferences
- Coffee && Tea
- Cats > Dogs
- Backend > Frontend
- AWS > Azure
- Minimum Lovable Product > Minimum Viable Product
- Minneapolis > St. Paul
- Public APIs > Giving lots of projects access to shared databases omg why do you hate happiness and data consistency please noooooo
- Monoliths && Microservices
- Async written communication > Adhoc meetings with no agenda (though I will attend all meetings because I am a chaotic extrovert)
- Live group demos > Static written documentation > Videos
- Configured Linters that run in CICD pipelines > Syntax feedback in PRs
- Testing in production (with gaurdrails) > Having to bribe QA with cookies every time you want to deploy something
- ALL THE LANGUAGES
Education
M.S. Software Engineering
University of St. Thomas
Data Management My first database class almost caused me to drop out of grad school and is also why I chose data management as my focus.
B.A. Global Studies
University of MN – Twin Cities
Governance, Peace, and Justice in the Middle East My offical Arabic proficiency test (a global studies requirement) involved me to acting out how I would handle an argument with a neighbor after acidentally destroying their window with a baseball, as well as proposing my own solution to the Palestine/Israel conlict.