Hello world, I'm Tess. Nice to meet you.
I am an experienced engineering leader and full stack software engineer with a strong Javascript and Node.js background.
Things I like include: combining the human & the technical, inclusive and equitable teams, learning & teaching via technical mentorship, examining & understanding complexity, and a focus on building useful products. This is a manager README I wrote during my time as a engineering manager at Kink.com that reflects my managerial thoughts at that time, and still feels generally true to who I am as both a manager and an individual contributor.
The overall work I'm most proud of is leading successful collaboration & mentorship; the technical work I'm most proud of is designing and building a video transcoding publishing pipeline on top of AWS products with a custom Vue CMS.
My software background is considered non-traditional; I have a degree in Earth Science and worked several geology jobs before doing an intensive coding course at Hackbright Academy in 2014, and have been working as a software engineer since then.
(Yes, I still love geology & rocks.)
Are you doing something excellent in the world and in need of some momentary or longer-term tech energies? Please get in touch, I love getting to contribute to friends', neighbors' and radical humans' projects.
current tech stack of the work & projects I am doing
- Shopify and Squarespace
most recent tech stack I've worked in
- Typescript and Javascript Node applications running on the Serverless framework
- MySQL database
- React frontend
- AWS (most familiar with Elastic Transcoder, Lambda, SNS, & S3)
other things i do
- currently training to be an EMT!
- organize to make the world a better place 🖤 🔻 🌈
- go into mountains and deserts
- look at rocks, birds, plants, trees
- go running, especially on amazing East Bay trails and biking on the road and climbing at the gym
- tool around in or work on Hazard, a 1982 Volkswagen van
- read lots of books - fiction, non-fiction, and poetry (pls share your book recs!)
random recent (to me, not all are new) things i admire or find interesting that are on the internet 🔗
- this rad librarian who spoke at DefCon! (official title is -- A Shadow Librarian: Fighting back against encroaching capitalism)
- Freedom of Sex: The moral case for letting trans kids change their bodies, a recent Andrea Long Chu essay about the also recent Judith Butler book
- How Tech Media Helped Write Gig Companies into Existence, interesting essay from 2020
- https://charity.wtf/, most especially this post
- Apparently Gen Z "does not understand file structures." Is this real?!
- sexy rat jackets! & the related fetish research
- Man Child, an Audre Lorde essay from Sister Outsider
- if you like reading poems sometimes
cheers! good bye & thank you for visiting