Secular Products

Overview

I’m part of small but nimble team that owns, builds, and maintains Primer, the design system that powers GitHub.com and many of the company’s marketing sites.

Responsibilities

• I’m one of the core maintainers of the Primer CSS framework, and have undertaken several large projects to improve its visual consistency, release workflows, and developer experience.
• As a Design Systems first responder I’ve offered code review, one-on-one support, design, and development assistance with hundreds of pull requests to the github.com Rails application, and deepened my understanding of Ruby along the way.
• I’ve built and shared GitHub Actions for publishing npm dozens of packages and continuously deploying Primer web sites.
• I’ve lead efforts to measure and improve Primer coverage on GitHub.com.
• I’ve learned React on the job and jointly developed the Primer Components framework from scratch.
• I’ve ported several Primer web sites from Jekyll to Next.js, and then to Gatsby, and learned a ton about continuous deployment on Now.

Overview

I serve in the U.S. government as a front end design lead at 18F, a division of the General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Service, alongside a brilliant team of designers, developers, product managers, strategists, and other wonderful, dedicated folks who are working to improve digital services for the American public.

Responsibilities

• I’m the technical lead on the U.S. Web Design Standards, a style guide and front end toolkit that aims to make it easier for government web designers and developers to deliver beautiful and accessible experiences with a consistent look and feel. I’m also the sole maintainer of the Standards Jekyll theme.
• I’ve played a hybrid designer/developer role on projects large and small, leading front end efforts, doing research, and leading exercises that engage our agency partners in the design process.
• In my lead capacity, I’m a part-time mentor for three colleagues, who I meet with weekly to discuss their work and career goals.

Responsibilities

• Shepherded projects from business development and specification through development and delivery
• Provided technical front end direction for 5-10 projects at any given time, plus design and code assistance for a team of 4-6 design technologists
• Project-specific design, technical planning, full-stack development and deployment
• Provided technical guidance to local governments on the design of open data policies and implementation of their public interfaces
• Taught data visualization courses at public and private universities
• Gave talks and lectures for public and private audiences on data visualization and open data policy
• Performed and evaluated research & development of new tools and techniques
• Initiated and maintained open source projects such as Modest Maps, Prosthetic, and Sando

Responsibilities

• Designed and developed an ActionScript-based UI development framework that was later adapted for use in a Sims franchise console game
• Aided the Flash interpreter development team by developing simple test cases for complex issues
• Worked with game programmers and designers to develop a workflow for getting Flash files from concept to production

Responsibilities

• Developed collaborative web application for PR firms
• Built scalable PHP tools for parsing and rendering standard data formats, including vCal and vCard, to enable PIM and PDA synchronization over the web
• Ported a legacy database abstraction layer to a class-based system in PHP5