Stanford University

South Eugene High School

A Computer Scientist Trying to Help Save the World

Organizing Empowerment Project

Director of Engineering

•	Developing strategic plan and ensuring that all operations fit within it, allowing us to double in size every year
•	Interviewing nonprofits to determine their technology needs and ensure that they leave satisfied
•	Refining nonprofit needs into small projects so that computer scientists can make meaningful contributions
•	Writing a business plan and managing fundraising and sponsorship proposals to make us self-sustaining
•	Contacting corporations, nonprofits, and social entrepreneurs across the country in preparation to scale
•	Transitioning Stanford Dance Marathon Hackathon's organizational structure into Code the Change, allowing for continuity with Hackathon's leadership and partnerships
•	Recruiting leadership to allow Code the Change to put on events once a month rather than annually

Code the Change

Founder, Director

At Empower (https://organizingempowerment.org), I'm working on an app to help communities organize and get out the vote.  We have a strong track record of success with relational organizing and research proving our effectiveness.

Reach out if you're interested!

Principal Software Engineer

At Nuna Health, we help make healthcare higher quality and more affordable.  We work with our clients to help them standardize and understand their health data so that they can make better decisions.

My team, data platform engineering, builds tools that let internal users process data.  For instance, we have a platform for writing simple transforms on the data and another one for data quality checks.

Nuna Inc.

Engineering Manager

I helped start the Data Platform Engineering team and became its tech lead.  This involved maintaining context on all parts of the code base, mentoring more junior members of the team, ensuring that we didn't accumulate too much technical debt, helping the team adopt a standard coding style, and collaborating with other teams on things like automation and work prioritization.

Staff Software Engineer

Because Nuna was just starting to scale up, I stepped in to a bunch of different roles depending on where there was most need.  A few things I did:
• Security and compliance work in preparation for a technical audit on TMSIS, our data warehouse for Medicaid.
• Project management and government partnership work on TMSIS
• Refactoring really messy legacy code
• Infrastructure engineering and cloud automation work

Senior Software Engineer

My team's goal was integrating modern programming practices into healthcare.gov to help people get healthcare, to improve government tech, and to save the government money.  We worked on two major projects:
1.  The Scalable Login System.  We replaced a login system that cost $240 million to build and $70 million per year to maintain.  Our new system cost under $5 million per year to build and maintain, it could scale to 1000x as many concurrent users as the previous system, it had 10x less user-visible downtime, and it was a drop-in replacement.
2.  App 2.0.  The previous healthcare application didn't perform client-side validations, didn't save user progress, and had numerous other usability issues.  Our new user interface fixed those high level problems and overall resulted in users completing the application in roughly half the time, which has saved Americans millions of hours of time over the past years.

healthcare.gov

Fixer

I worked on Google's engineering education team.  I had two major responsibilities:

1.  Developing an internal question/answer system (similar to StackOverflow).  My biggest accomplishment was a large refactor that made the codebase substantially easier to maintain by deleting 90% of the lines of backend code with no loss in functionality.

2.  Creating a new diversity-focused engineering education program.  This includes designing curriculum and running and evaluating a pilot.

Google

Software Engineer

•  Revamping assignments, developing course materials, facilitating weekly discussion groups, grading papers, and managing overall logistics for Computers, Ethics, and Public Policy
•  Holding office hours for a computer science probability course
•  Leading a design studio for an introductory human computer interaction class

Teaching Assistant

•  Creating a comprehensive set of recommendations for improving Ashoka's management and company culture
•  Designing a new management workflow to help Ashoka effectively utilize outsourced programmers
•  Developing a testing suite for Changemakers.com website, including its entrepreneur social networking app

Ashoka

Software Engineering Intern

• Designing, programming, and testing a validator and interoperability test suite for missing persons databases, which allowed Google Person Finder to meet the People Finder Interchange Format specification: source code is at http://code.google.com/p/pfif-tools/ and production deployment is at http://pfif-tools.appspot.com/
• Soliciting user interface feedback from missing persons database developers, yielding a highly usable test suite
• Presenting test suite to Google.org engineers and engineers on other teams, resulting in wide support

Software Engineering Intern, Google.org Crisis Response Team

• Developing course plan, lesson plans, examples, questions, and all other course materials for a class on Practical Unix, taught for the first time in Spring, 2011, which is accessible for new computer scientists, researchers in non-computer-science fields, and experienced computer scientists
• Learning online teaching methodology so that all course videos will be available online, increasing access to computer science education

Teacher, Practical Unix

•	Developing an open source machine learning service, allowing easier development of future InSTEDD disease surveillance.  Code at http://code.google.com/p/instedd-machine-learning/
•	Teaching Cambodian programmers about algorithms and the mathematical basis for CS
•	Seeing the conditions in rural Cambodia to ensure that InSTEDD software addresses the needs of our end users

InSTEDD

•	Helping students debug code
•	Grading assignments, which includes finding functional and stylistic errors
•	Leading a once-per-week section on programming methodology and abstractions
•	Developing testing suites to automate grading, saving hundreds of hours of time for section leaders
•	Identifying student needs unmet by the lectures and recording tutorial videos as supplementary course materials

Computer Science Department Section Leader

•	Engaging with the student government and administration to ensure fair treatment of LGBTQ students; ie
	-	running a successful campaign for a queer-friendly student body president
	-	getting healthcare for trans people covered under Stanford’s health insurance plan
	-	increasing the time dedicated to diversity training and queer issues during RA training
	-	working with Housing to change gender normative questions on housing questionnaires
	-	supporting a Queer Studies minor
•	Representing the Stanford queer community to the student government and to national queer organizations
•	Planning events to create safe spaces for LGBTQ students and to raise awareness about LGBTQ issues
•	Maintaining budget for QSA, which allows for quick decisions on event funding
•	Funding queer groups on campus (ie, Jewish Queers, Queer and Asian), allowing for diverse groups to meet the varied needs of their members

Stanford Queer Straight Alliance

Co-Chair and Financial Officer

•	Running practice debates and drills, lecturing, traveling to debate tournaments, and coordinating research for Palo Alto debaters, resulting in accomplishments such as a second-year team winning second place in the varsity division of the Saint Francis High School tournament
•	Programming a platform for paperless debate, saving debaters hundreds of dollars on airfare for evidence

Palo Alto Unified School District

Debate Coach

•	Creating ASSU websites; for instance, the Student Jobs website, which became one of the top-viewed ASSU sites within two weeks of going live
•	Maintaining ASSU site as a whole, including programming extensions to Joomla plugins which allow the ASSU to link to previously-hidden sites without spending hours changing individual sites’ organizations
•	Assisting community members in maintaining their own ASSU subdomains, allowing for shared hosting and reducing technical support costs

Deputy Chair of Technology

•	Helping plan and run Stanford’s High School Tournament, which raised $5000 more than projected
•	Creating evidence database, allowing team to collaborate on research and access research while at tournaments

Stanford Debate Society

Policy Debate Captain and Webmaster

•	Directing finances and fundraising, which was sufficient to pay back all loans after the campaign
•	Political consulting, speech writing, volunteer coordinating, and organizing public appearances, which secured 8% of the vote in a 7-way open primary

Chris Crew for County Commissioner Campaign

Campaign Manager

•	Training executive director to self-manage PSO site and networks, saving the organization hundreds of dollars
•	Designing and maintaining website
•	Networking computers

Sam King