Experience

Technical Roles

Staff Software Engineer

Ad Hoc

January 2021 to present

Team lead for the Design System Team for the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Developer

Sparkbox

June 2017 to December 2020

Working with clients to create better web experiences. Building a variety of different types of sites from one-page designs to large e-commerce sites.

Software Engineer

Lexis Nexis

March 2016 to June 2017

Front end development and automated test writing for an enterprise news aggregation web app.

Community Building

Group Co-Leader

Dayton Women Code Together

January 2019 to August 2019

Working with the community to create and build a supportive group of women and non-binary technologists in the Dayton region.

Chapter Co-Leader

Girl Develop It - Dayton**

July 2016 to January 2019

Working with the community to create and build a supportive group of women and non-binary developers in the Dayton region.

** This link goes to a page with information about misconduct by the GDI leadership and reasons why I chose to leave the organization.

Technical Articles

Blog Post

What technology are you interested in?

This question used to stymie me. Is there a technology I'm most interested in? If there isn't, should there be? What does it say about me as a developer if there isn't? Does it mean anything?

Oct 3, 2021

Blog Post

Rebuilding My Site - 2021 Version

Rebuilding my site with GraphCMS and Nuxt was overall a good experience, but not without its challenges.

Jan 24, 2021

Technical Article

An Introduction to Running Lighthouse Programmatically

Being able to run Google’s Lighthouse analysis suite programmatically provides a lot of advantages, especially for larger or more complex web applications. Using Lighthouse programmatically allows engineers to set up quality monitoring for sites that need more customization than straightforward applications of Lighthouse (such as Lighthouse CI) allow. This article contains a brief introduction to Lighthouse, discusses the advantages of running it programmatically, and walks through a basic configuration.

Sep 11, 2020

Technical Article

What Do We Value Most About Design Systems

Katy dives into the answers to the 2019 Design Systems Survey open-ended questions and presents the three benefits of design systems that both agency and in-house team respondents value most.

Nov 4, 2019

Technical Article

4 Strategies to Advocate for Project Improvements

Ever have great ideas for improving projects but don’t know how to bring them up? Katy shares how you can effectively advocate for your improvements while being considerate of your team and clients.

May 27, 2019

All Technical Articles