Sole developer of the 4P Pricing tool. A true ‘hack’sterpiece that ran on my work laptop for several years, 4P started as a passion project to automate market research in order to get the prices possible for government buyers. But no good deed goes unnoticed! An OIG audit (despite millions of dollars saved) later, and now I’m (stuck?) working as a solutions architect on a team dedicated to building a fully compliant version of the tool, that accomplishes so, so much more. I’m exhausted, but still unbelievable proud of the forthcoming FAS Catalog Platform (FCP).

This job was incredibly demanding (and nearly broke my marriage on several occasions). But I somehow landed on a team that was charged with re-imagining the Public Assistance program and creating purpose-built software to manage PA program delivery. For the first time, I got paired up with another developer, Nathan Lietzke, who taught me more about software development than my tiny brain could handle at the time. Nate gave me the tools to take my abilities to the next level and I am forever in his debt.

After being kicked out of the Coast Guard, I somehow got a job where I – kid you not – got paid to tweet about local emergencies. Naturally, I became obsessed with building an application that would simultaneuosly tweet, blog and SMS message those emergencies out to my fellow New Yorkers, and also automatically build pretty reports about the nature / locations of said emergencies. NYCEM gave me 12-overnight hours a day to teach myself to code, and I am forever grateful for that. Oh, and I also built a cool app that assigned city employees to the closest emergency shelter in need of staffing.

Let me tell you a story about a girl who couldn’t afford college, joined the military, and then got sent to drive a ship in Sitka, Alaska – only to find out that she suffered from crippling sea-sickness… Okay I’ll save that one for another day. But the key part of the story is: I got assigned as the ship’s store manager, which I was completely annoyed with – offended even. I became obsessed with doing as little work as possible as the ship’s store manager, and ended up building my first application to handle the store’s stock / invoicing. And the journey began.

University of Pennsylvania, Bachelors of Art: Political Science and the Islamic Middle East. I’d give anything to do this all over again, from the highest highs to the lowest lows. It was amazing, humbling and I wasted too much time worrying about footing the bill. In the end it all worked out.