About Permalink to "About" section

One of the first online games I discovered. I joined the community as a player and stayed as a developer.

• Member of the development team for the game and the web infrastructure
• Written several server plug-ins to introduce new game modes or help server administration
• Hosted the largest North American community run game servers
• Led the effort in launching a unified competitive league in the community

I hang around #jekyll on Libera and help out users. Some of my efforts for the Jekyll community have been through open source themes and unorthodox projects to solve common problems in Jekyll without the use of plug-ins.

I created a Liquid-only, JavaScript-free, GitHub Actions-free way of...

• Generating a Table of Contents on GitHub Pages used by Docker, UK Ministry of Justice, Apache, Google, JetBrains, and more.
• Adding anchors to headings (i.e., h1 - h6) used by Travis CI, Riot.js, Microsoft's (former) TypeScript website, and more.

I spent time on #socrata-soda on Freenode helping provide support for PHP users and general API help. Since I no longer use Socrata in the workplace or school, my participation in the community has diminished.

• Improved Excel support for SODA.NET
• Wrote PhpSoda as an alternative to the official PHP library
• Contributed to dev.socrata.com fixing UI issues

I work on the Enterprise Technology team, focusing on frontend development for our in-house web applications. Here, I inherited several websites, all with different UI, architectures, and design patterns. During my tenure, I have been migrating the websites to share a common component library, thereby reducing the differences in building and managing the websites.

Like at every company, I wear many hats and helped migrate the department from BitBucket to GitHub. I now help manage our GitHub organization and have introduced several dozen pipelines to automate processes that were once time-consuming manual workflows. For example, the websites I inherited were built by separate contractors, and all have their own custom build and deployment processes. Now, all the websites I maintain have a uniform build process and pipeline for deploying the websites to their respective AWS environments (i.e., dev, test, or prod). My next step has already begun, and I am helping other teams bring automation to their workflows and processes.

As the only frontend developer on the team, there's a lot on my plate at any given time. To allow me to focus on the bigger tasks, I established the department's first student development team. Previously, students were primarily hired for service desk positions, where they troubleshooted, configured, and managed services, and occasionally built applications that were never deployed to production. My student development team, being the first of its kind in the IT department, has completed its first year as of August 2025. During this time, it has pushed 34 pull requests to production. This number is estimated to grow in the coming year with the expansion of my team from one student to 4 students. Starting this student development team has allowed me to continue mentoring and teaching junior developers.

I was a full-stack developer focusing on front-end development, where I worked on the Community Enablement team. In this role, I contributed to improving existing moderator tools. I played a crucial role in revamping our JavaScript codebase by converting it into modules and rewriting portions of the website to enhance accessibility. Additionally, I actively contributed to Stacks, our CSS framework and component library, by providing bug fixes and implementing accessibility improvements.

In my previous role on the Community Products Engagement team, I participated in the long-term project of sunsetting Developer Stories and the Jobs platform. This involved enhancing our GDPR processes to enable self-serving options for the Jobs platform, refactoring tightly coupled code from our monolith application, and coordinating the deletion of related data across multiple databases.

Additionally, I was a founding member of two working groups, the front-end and accessibility guild, where I helped establish standards and guidelines for use across the organization. I designed and developed accessible UI components, including charts, character limit counters, draggable elements, and sortable tables. I unified the developer workflow for writing lightly interactive Stimulus components and heavily interactive Svelte components. My efforts significantly reduced the amount of JavaScript required by thousands of lines by introducing reusable Stimulus components.

I actively engaged with the Stack Exchange community, addressing bug reports and building valuable tools for site moderators. I was one of the three developers responsible for making Winter Bash 2023 possible; I wrote SQL queries for awarding hats, adding a fun and festive element to the community experience. Beyond my professional work, I volunteered as a mentor for Techtonica, a boot camp that supports women and non-binary individuals transitioning into the technology field.

I led the development of multiple projects and managed/mentored a team of student developers. My main focuses were open source, software architecture, automation, code generation, and accessibility. I actively maintained PHP, Python, and React (TypeScript) libraries/tools that could be reused across multiple projects and departments. I also maintained Drupal and WordPress instances for the main campus and individual departments.

By collaborating with a colleague, we successfully introduced the concept of GitOps into our infrastructure team's workflow and have completely automated the deployment of resources using a CI/CD process powered by GitHub Actions. We also established guidelines and practices for the deployment of new applications to be possible through Docker and Kubernetes.

Alongside the Universal Design Center (UDC), I worked on making CSUN's web presence significantly more accessible and researching new patterns for building accessible components, such as "mega menus" and chat interfaces.

For my team of student developers, I had them contribute to and build production-level web applications. We used GitHub and a pretty standard git-flow workflow using pull requests and code reviews. Through our code review process, I gave my students feedback on how to improve their code and also have them review other full-time developers' code; giving them the opportunity to learn how to work on a team of developers.

I worked as a part of the marketing team as a web developer maintaining the Associated Students website up to date with coming events and information about the services we provided. I did front-end development for the main website and built static websites for special events using Jekyll or stakx. I made sure that all of the organization's web pages were accessible and followed Section 508 requirements.

I built internal Symfony based tools and websites used for linking together different webhooks and APIs to our project management software; this allowed our team to use different services depending on our needs but were still able to use a single project management tool. Some of the components I built for these projects were made open source such as PhpPulse, a library for interacting with the monday.com API. These projects allowed us to have transparency with our clients as we gave them to ability to view the status of their project and communicate with the team more freely.

I was a part of Santa Monica's web development team where I worked on building and maintaining city websites; additionally, I contributed to several of their open source projects. Some of the bigger projects I worked on was building search functionality for the Historic Resources Inventory database, publishing our website analytics, redesigning the BigBlueBus website to be mobile responsive, moving all Team Foundation Server repositories to Git, and getting automated previews for pull requests against our static websites.

During the summers of 2014, 2015, and 2016, I worked with the community broadband division and helped run the Youth Tech Program where I wrote the web development curriculum and served as the lead web development instructor. I covered topics such as, Git, GitHub Pages, and using Bootstrap to build mobile-responsive websites.

The Classroom Technology Committee (CTC) is an ad-hoc working group reporting to the Advisory Committee on Academic Technology, comprising stakeholders and individuals with an interest in ensuring the effective use of classroom technologies.

Making accessible content and UIs all while having student developers help is hard, but it doesn't have to be. I talk about my experience having my student developers build the campus' in-house websites for their classmates by building and using our accessible-first component library.

Student success is something every team on campus strives to achieve but that doesn't mean they achieve it. During my 2.5 years tenure on the web development team, I managed nearly a dozen students; mentoring them and teaching them how to work on real-world applications.

I talk about an "unorthodox" view of student success and why it's impactful to students in the field of technology; because let's face it, a lot of adults don't remember what it's like trying to get their first job. I also talk about what I learned on what worked and what didn't while managing students.

California State University, Northridge has finally joined in the fun of modern development practices! Here we talk about how we're using the following,

• CI for running unit tests, linting, and security scans
• CD for deploying from Git branches automatically to our staging and production environments
• Terraform for automatically creating and updating our infrastructure in AWS

California State University, Northridge has started to see the evils pains of managing hundreds of VMs. We talk about how we have stopped waiting weeks for other teams to create VMs for developers and how we're using Kubernetes to make applications incredibly easier to maintain.

I participated in Docker's Docs Hackathon to help improve their documentation website. I'm not familiar enough with Docker to be able to update/write documentation so I participated in a way I could still benefit the community: I submitted pull request #2860, which improved the responsive behavior of the website and reduced the redundancy of certain aspects of the site's Jekyll code. This single pull request fixed several known issues that existed and several issues that hadn't been reported yet.

I participated in CSUN's first annual AppJam event with a team of friends to create Coral Finance—a sandboxed financial stock application. The goal of this app was to expose students to the stock market risk-free by simulating purchases of real stocks to show profit or losses. I created a fake stock market, accessible through an API, which moved at a quicker pace than the real stock market to see quicker results.

• Branding, UI/UX - Raymond Barrios
• iOS Developer - Kyle Shaver
• Motion Designer - Danilo De Leon