I am a product manager, service designer, and team director with extensive experience making government digital services usable, effective, and efficient.
Buildkite started in Australia over a decade ago as a hybrid-first, secure CI/CD platform. Trusted by engineering teams at companies like Airbnb, Shopify, Uber, and Canva, by 2024 Buildkite had grown into a mature, multi-product software delivery platform, but its external messaging hadn’t kept up. Despite an impressive customer base, Buildkite was still described as the “best-kept secret in…
Buildkite is a fast-growing software delivery provider serving global leaders including Airbnb, Canva, Elastic, Lyft, Shopify, Slack, and Uber. However, in early 2024, it had a problem: it was still known as the “best-kept secret in CI/CD,” not exactly ideal for a growing company. To address this, 2024 saw new marketing leadership at Buildkite. This new team had specific deep experience in…
Each year the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs fund small businesses to provide innovative solutions to NASA problems. The NASA SBIR/STTR team reached out to 18F to help them use design methods to streamline their funding application process in a user-centered way. I filled the…
The United States Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (USEITI) was part of an international effort to promote open and accountable management of natural resources. For over two years, I led an agile, iterative effort to create a site that provides data about how the U.S. manages extractive industries in a user-centric way. The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) is a…
The Obama Administration had been trying to rank colleges for years, but coming to consensus on what ‘good’ means had proven too difficult. Instead, the College Scorecard provides data on student outcomes both as an easy-to-use online tool, and as an open-data API for others to make their own tools from. As Lisa Gelobter put it in her post on whitehouse.gov , “this work was truly collaborative…
I finished my Presidential Innovation Fellowship six months ago, and I feel like it’s taken that long to process the journey. For those of you who are considering government service, considering the Innovation Fellowship specifically, or merely curious, I offer these reflections on my year as a PIF. What a year! What a year. What A year! Serving as a Presidential Innovation Fellow was spectacular.…
Round Three of the Presidential Innovation Fellows program is now accepting applications from creative, energetic policy hackers, entrepreneurs, user experience experts, designers, frontend developers, backend developers, system architecture wizards, data wranglers, and more to serve their tours of duty to radically improve the delivery of government digital services. Why should you (yes, YOU)…
Wouldn’t it be great if we designers/developers could just move bits of website around visually and get beautiful, well-structured code to work with out the other end? The stuff of dreams! If this is your dream, then this might be your year! In service of The Future, I tested (or attempted to test) four of the current front-runners: Webflow , Divshot , Froont , and Jetstrap . Read on for a summary…
I’ve gone to my first hackathon! Super nerdy ! I thought they only wanted coders at these sorts of things, but friends said that designers and UX folks are welcome, too. So off I went…and our team won! This particular hackathon was the First Ever at the Smithsonian (!), and we were tasked with using the Luce Foundation Center’s newly-opened-on-a-trial-basis API to come up with new interactive…
“But why,” I ask myself, “why should I use systems built by very smart people to suit a wide variety of website needs when I can spend time and energy making my own from scratch?” Why indeed. Actually, in all seriousness, there are very good reasons for me, someone who traveled the path of web development from print design to html/css and now towards object-oriented programming, to practice…