Selected Projects
Open source
At USDS, I've gotten to work on a few open source projects that I'm excited to get to share
- The Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool helps implement the White House's Justice 40 initiative. For this project, I analyzed source data, wrote ETL transformations (including geospatial transformations), performed code reviews, added the bulk of the project's automated tests, wrote and debugged CI/CD steps, and helped plan and support the project's production deployment. The project is entirely open source and available on github.
- Fact-specific income proxies for emergency rental assistance reduce the burden on applicants who need rental assistance while also reducing the risk of abuse to the government by supporting claims of need with census data. For this project, I worked with a data science team to source data and design a methodology for designing proxies (linked above) and then designed and implemented a luigi-based data pipeline to generate the necessary data for the majority of addresses in the US. The example pipeline is open source and available on github.
- The TechFAR Hub provides resources for government procurement professionals to procure software developed using modern techniques (agile, lean, SAAS, etc) within teh framework required by the Federal Acquisitions Regulations system. We are currently re-developing the site, taking what was a weekend project to get something up and applying user research and content strategy to broaden the site's impact. I am handling development of a quasi-CMS built using gatsby.js (using react and typescript) and github actions. The development is in a public repo on github and is open source.
Public but closed source
- DirectFile is the U.S. Government's first web-based system to allow U.S. Tax filers to file their taxes directly with the IRS, using a guided-interview format. For this project, I initially established the architecture and core functionality of the client application (a react SPA), contributed to the custom graph database used to store and calculate tax facts, and implemented tax logic directly as code. As the project progressed, I took a staff engineer/engineering lead role, leading a dozen engineers to complete the client application for a successful public launch and guiding technical and product decisions while continuing to contribute high-risk or high-complexity features.
- BecomeAnEX.org is a clinically-based, online tobacco cessation program run by Truth Initiative, my previous employer. I lead the port of the system from an proprietary (and abandoned) PHP framework to Django/Python, the API-based integration of the system with Truth's in-house SMS system, and the technical compliance work required for the team to become HIPAA compliant. I also played a significant role in moving the system from a traditional colo hosting (with a single production application server and database) to a cloud based IAAS platform. As the lead developer, I helped with bridging the technical team with the business and product, set standards for how the team developed code, helped set policies for how the team operated overall (e.g, SDLC, security reviews, etc), and played a role in the design and implementation of nearly every feature for years.
- ubiquitxt is an SMS-based tobacco cessation tool with a strong clinical record in helping people quit smoking, run by Truth Initiative, my previous employer. I designed APIs to integrate ubiquitxt with BecomeAnEX.org and other internal tools, lead efforts to scale its capacity by two orders of magnitude to handle major media events, and wrote data analysis tools in jupyter and pandas to help our team understand user behavior over SMS.
Selected Projects
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