My professional work is centered around supporting practicioners of various kinds; for the last several years of my career, that’s been through software development.

I’m currently a programmer working in Democratic politics; in past roles I’ve been a data engineer for healthcare.gov digital outreach, a platform engineer for a media company, and a field organizer for state legislative races.

I’ve spent much of my non-professional time working in the reproductive justice movement. That has included leading the development efforts on an abortion fund case management system; a tour of duty on the DC Abortion Fund board of directors; and many years of clinic defense with the Washington Area Clinic Defense Task Force.

I also played bass in Karman Line.

Projects on the Internet

DARIA: A case management system for abortion funds.

Starting in 2015, I led an open source, all-volunteer project with my friendly neighborhood Code for America brigade to get the DC Abortion Fund’s intake out of a massive spreadsheet and into a webapp. Since deploying in late 2016 it’s been adopted by multiple other abortion funds, and those funds have run better operations as a result. My experiences here were the basis for the talks I gave at RubyConf 2018 and RailsConf 2017.

Simpsons Optimizer: A Simpsons JSON and Redirect API

SimpsonsWorld is right up there with the wheel for great accomplishments of human civilization. This provides a Random button filtering only to good episodes from a dataset I put together. It can also spit out JSON of season or episode data. It was written in server-side javascript as an excuse to try out Express (VERDICT: It’s nice).

Simpsons Data: An open dataset of Simpsons data

This is a dataset assembled by watching a lot of Simpsons episodes to figure out which were the good ones and which were the bad ones, and associating them with SimpsonsWorld URLs. It powers Simpsons Optimizer.

PEP 599: Python 4 Features: Proposal to put four all new snakes in python 4

I bought python4.org during a domain name sale and this seemed like a good use of it, honestly.

Conference talks

It's Dangerous to Go Alone: Building Teams Like an Organizer
(video) (slides)

A talk about experiences applying principles of community organizing to programming work, and how it isn’t a huge departure from how we work now. It was a reflection on my experience running a community project at Code for DC, and my surprise at drawing former experiences as a community organizer more heavily than I thought I would. It’s more or less an argument for leaning in to the community and people parts of open source work, and the importance of other people in making sure open source work doesn’t fade away if maintainers need to step back. (Also the first talk I ever gave at a conference.)

Data Ethics for Regular Developers
(video) (slides)

I have handled a lot of PII in my career and have tried to be very careful with it. This was an effort to distill it into some takeaways and reflect on things that I got wrong the first time and why; it’s also encouraging working programmers to face these questions head-on as we build stuff. It draws heavily from my work handling abortion patient data, and what we’ve done to minimize risks to those individuals. As a bonus, there’s a point in the video where I completely space on how PowerPoint works, and this heavily features a dril tweet, so this talk really does have it all.