I am a storyteller, organizer and engineer who uses technology to empower progressive change.

My deepest interests are in climate change, energy efficiency, bicycle advocacy and international development…but I'm open to new and inspiring ideas.

I’ve worked as software engineer, writer, graphic designer, photographer and political campaigner.

Recent projects

Canadian Merit Scholarship Foundation

I took CMSF’s scholarship application process online. Students win: they get an easier-to-use process and a more polished application. CMSF wins with better data for analysis, real-time tracking of in-progress scholarship applications and an up-to-date geocoded list of every school in Canada.

TurboVote

TurboVote is the Netflix for voting: a one-stop shop to register to vote and request an absentee ballot. We send you a ballot and a pre-addressed, pre-stamped envelope to help you register, and then text and email reminders so you don't miss elections. I also built the best database of local election officials in the United States.

New Leaders Council

After graduating from the NLC Institute, I created and seeded an internal wiki; set up a branded URL shortener; acquired a new twitter handle and created web applications to manage the 40 Under 40 Awards and Institute Fellow selection processes. I also redesigned the donation page and award certificates.

Democratic National Committee

For the 2010 US midterm election, I built a text messaging and IVR-based phonebanking tool. Volunteers who texted OFA’s shortcode received a call back and were immediately connected with a live voter. This let people GOTV anywhere, anytime, without a computer, smartphone or call list.

Engineers Without Borders

Most recently, I co-designed the delegate handbook for Kumvana, EWB’s national conference. I’ve created a wiki and an iGoogle theme, built parts of MyEWB, mapped MPs to postal codes for the Make Poverty History campaign’s letter-writing tool, added functionality to Blue State Digital’s software for the World of Opportunity fundraising campaign and generated targeted mailing lists for fundraising.

Interests

Voter registration

Having built two online voter registration systems, I am familiar with the rules, oddities and procedures for voter registration and absentee ballot requests in most US states, territories and the District of Columbia.

Advocacy

My time and money go to causes I believe in: bicycle advocacy, open government, civil liberties and international development. I am a big supporter of Engineers Without Borders Canada and the Sunlight Foundation.

Software

My work has focused on user interface consistency, writing good error messages, training engineers on effective bug reporting, full-stack web application development and Mac OS X.

Music

For eight years, I ran a house concert series in Sunnyvale and San Francisco, California. I presented 52 shows by 43 artists from the United States and Canada.

Latest blog post

Life hack: buy two belts

Belt shopping is a pain. It’s often difficult to find something you like — in my case, as plain and free of ornamentation as possible — and that’s reasonably priced. The value of the time spent looking is often more … Continue reading →

Recent tweets

Photography

I love shooting concerts. Sometimes — when you’re lucky — you capture just the right moment.