I'm a software engineer at the New Jersey Office of Innovation, where we use human-centered design and agile engineering to build more effective government tech solutions.

Here are some of the projects I've worked on while here:

NEW JERSEY TEMPORARY DISABILITY INSURANCE

* Usability improvements to the online application to make a new claim for TDI benefits.

NEW JERSEY FILE YOUR STATE TAXES

* The state version of IRS DirectFile, enabling taxpayers to file for free.

* The codebase is a shared Rails project hosted by Code for America and used by several states.

* I worked on features like property tax deductions, Earned Income Tax Credit, Driver License verification, and more. Ask me about Box 14 income sometime if you want to get into a whole thing.

NJDOL APPEALS RESEARCH TOOL

* When the NJ Dept. of Labor approves or rejects Unemployment Insurance claims, this can be appealed.

* We set up a daily import of anonymized appeal information from Salesforce, and present it in a searchable tool so that New Jerseyans can compare their own situations to those in past decisions. That way they can better understand and improve their chances of successfully appealing.

* The database is on Postgres and I did some fun SQL optimizations to be able to quickly return search results from 400,000+ decisions of 300+ words.

NJ UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE CERTIFICATION

* I helped upgrade the web interface that New Jerseyans receiving Unemployment Insurance use weekly to certify that they are still eligible to receive the payments.

* I upgraded the email receipts from plaintext to HTML which improved readability and trust. (This might sound easy, like "oh ok he just copy/pasted some stuff in," but oh no. To upgrade that logic, there was a lot of cleanup to isolate it, cover it by tests for the first time, etc.)

Spin is a "micromobility" company that enables people to rent bikes and scooters through a smartphone app.

I was the Engineering Manager for the Rider Experience team, which was the core team for our rider-facing app. (The app you're probably thinking of: see a map of nearby vehicles, rent one, etc.). We added new features, kept the app stable and secure, and coordinated with other teams that worked on specific feature areas like payments or market compliance.

We used Rails and React Native, with some native mobile technologies mixed in too.

In October 2022, about 10% of Spin was laid off, including myself and the engineers on the Rider Core team.

During my 5-year tenure at Spin, we processed over 29 million trips, with a median time of 11 minutes.

I was the first full-time, mobile app-focused engineer on the team. There was an existing React Native app that I added a bunch of features to over the course of about 2 years. As the team grew (we got acquired by Ford in late 2018), I started to do more product / process / release coordination, check-ins with team members, and code reviews than actually picking up new work myself.

Exygy is a certified B-corp agency which partners with civic government agencies and non-profits to leverage agile technology for social change.

I developed apps using technologies like native iOS and Android, React, Angular, Rails, and Javascript for various mission-driven clients:

* The San Francisco Mayor's Office of Housing and Community Development: Streamlined the paper-based application system for affordable housing in San Francisco with the DAHLIA Housing Portal. https://housing.sfgov.org/

* The Metropolitan Transportation Commission: Provided transportation, environment, and civic data visualizations relevant to the Bay Area with Vital Signs.

http://www.vitalsigns.mtc.ca.gov/

* Environmental Working Group: Provided health and environmental data on over 100,000 cosmetic and food products with the Healthy Living mobile app.

* SFO Airport: Managed several thousand daily taxi trips flowing through the airport, with TaxiQ.

As Android Team Lead from January 2016 until July 2017, I was ultimately responsible for the timeliness, accuracy, relevance, and quality of all the Android tutorials published on RayWenderlich.com, a site which had several million pageviews per month. I worked with authors and editors to keep output top-notch on twenty-five tutorials during my tenure.

Other highlights from my time writing and editing on that team:

Dec 2015: Wrote an article on Android Design Patterns, explaining classic software design patterns and how they apply to Android development in plain terms.

May 2015: Wrote two tutorials on how to build an iOS app in Swift using ResearchKit, Apple’s open source framework to aid development of medical research apps. Apple specifically links to my tutorials from http://researchkit.org/ and mentioned them onstage at WWDC 2016 during “What’s New in ResearchKit.”

Feb 2014: Published a 3-part, comprehensive “Make Your First Android App” tutorial that has been used in college syllabi and reached over a million pageviews.