# Tara Vancil > I run Northwoods Digital, a software agency providing web development, custom software, and tech support to businesses across Northern Michigan. Location: Cheboygan, Michigan, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/taravancil Iʼm Tara Vancil, the owner of Northwoods Digital LLC. As a lifelong computer nerd, I know how powerful technology can be, and how frustrating it is when it gets in the way. I believe that technology should be simple, fast, and intuitive. Thatʼs why Iʼm passionate about helping businesses use technology to make their work easier, not more complicated. Over the years, I’ve worked as a software engineer, built systems used by millions of people every day, and helped organizations solve complex technical challenges. With Northwoods Digital, I bring that experience to businesses of all sizes, helping them build better websites, automate repetitive tasks, and get more value out of the technology they rely on every day. ## Work Experience ### Owner, Northwoods Digital @ Northwoods Digital Jan 2022 – Present | Cheboygan, Michigan, United States I work closely with business owners to deliver high-quality custom websites and software solutions. With over ten years experience working as as software engineer for large technology companies, my goal is to help businesses save money, work efficiently, and reach more customers. If you are looking to elevate your business, contact me today at tara@northwoods.digital. ### Software Engineer @ VotingWorks Jan 2022 – Jan 2022 ### Software Engineer @ Stripe Jan 2021 – Jan 2022 | Austin, Texas, United States ### Senior Software Engineer @ Indeed.com Jan 2020 – Jan 2021 | Austin, Texas, United States I’m part of an internal platforms team responsible for two critical platforms: the global header service, and a microfrontends platform that allows teams to ship independently by decoupling content providers from their host web pages. We work primarily with TypeScript, React, CSS-in-JS, and Java. We own several libraries and services that facilitate rapid UI development and experimentation at Indeed, including a server-side rendering service and an internal polyfill service, along with tooling to encourage best practices in testing, accessibility, and internationalization. - Designed and implemented performance logging on all pages where the global header is enabled, enabling real-time monitoring of client-side performance and providing visibility into impact of A/B tests on key performance metrics. - Worked with a junior engineer to design and implement click logging in the global header. Instrumented click events to support real-time detection of click anomalies. - Established and implemented test strategies to prevent accessibility regressions in support of maintaining WCAG 2.1 compliance. - Implemented various features and fixes to internal libraries to support micro-frontend platform users. ### Software Engineer @ Glitch Jan 2019 – Jan 2020 | Greater New York City Area I worked on a team of engineers responsible for the glitch.com homepage, user auth, user profile pages, and marketing pages. I later joined the team responsible for the Glitch collaborative code editor (glitch.com/edit). - Specified a plan to migrate glitch.com marketing content to a headless CMS and worked with marketing team to understand requirements. Migrated content and deployed CMS with zero downtime. - Initiated an effort to implement server-side rendering on glitch.com. Implemented code-splitting, dynamic imports, and pagination to improve client-side performance. - Instrumented the Glitch editor's implementation of Operational Transformation to verify its correctness and establish a baseline for error rates. - Implemented various fixes and improvements to features like GitHub import/export, find/replace, app previews, and more. ### Co-Founder @ Beaker Browser Jan 2017 – Jan 2019 | Austin, TX I was the co-founder of Beaker, an experimental web browser built with Electron. Beaker's purpose was to explore what new capabilities could be exposed in a web browser by introducing a peer-to-peer protocol as a first-class citizen of the browser's networking stack. In addition to standard browser interfaces like tabs, history, and bookmarks, we built several unique interfaces to support downloading and publishing peer-to-peer content from the browser. Most notably, we developed an in-browser text editor for creating and publishing websites, “forking” other peer-to-peer websites, and viewing peer seeding activity for a given website. - Helped specify Beaker's DatArchive browser APIs and its Content Security Policies for building applications on the dat:// network. - Designed and built Beaker's internal applications (text editor, start page, history, bookmarks, View Source). - Designed, built, and authored beakerbrowser.com, including Beaker's documentation - Helped build and launch hashbase.io, a cloud peer service for the dat:// protocol - Promoted dat:// and Beaker by building several example applications, writing how-to guides, and speaking at conferences ### Systems Engineer @ Cloudflare, Inc. Jan 2017 – Jan 2017 | Austin, Texas Software engineer working on Cloudflare Apps. ### Participant @ Recurse Center Jan 2016 – Jan 2016 | New York, New York, United States I spent 3 months at the Recurse Center (RC), a self-led educational retreat for programmers. I primarily spent my time at RC gaining experience owning projects from start to finish— defining an application's architecture, setting up build and test processes in JavaScript and Node.js, and familiarizing myself with the process of publishing Node.js libraries for public consumption. ### House cleaner, delivery driver, and more @ Various Jan 2014 – Jan 2016 | Austin, Texas I worked various jobs while learning how to write software. I'm "self-taught", which is to say that I leveraged free online courses, software blogs, tutorials, and good 'ol fashioned practice to guide my growth. ## Education ### College Dropout in Pre-Medicine/Pre-Medical Studies Central Michigan University Jan 2010 – Jan 2014 ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/taravancil - Website: https://www.northwoods.digital - Website: https://taravancil.com --- Source: https://flows.cv/taravancil JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/taravancil/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-29