Hello there.
I'm Jenny. I work as a full-stack software engineer with user experience research and design skills. I live in Cambridge (the American one) and work at Dimagi, building technology for underserved communities.
At Dimagi, I'm the senior director of product engineering for the US health division, which means that I run the division's technology team. I've been a software engineer for quite a while. Before joining Dimagi, I worked at athenahealth and at eBay.
I experimented with being a designer but missed debugging too much and came back to software development. I hold a master's degree in human-computer interaction from Carnegie Mellon University and a bachelor's degree in computer science from Worcester Polytechnic Institute. I'm currently pursuing a master's in applied sociology at UMass Boston.
I'm interested in lots of things.
Professionally, I'm a prolific contributor to CommCareHQ. For the past few years, I've been largely focused on US-based projects for COVID-19 response and behavioral health. Prior to that, I've worked in a variety of areas in Dimagi. One of the most directly impactful projects I've been involved with is mLabour, a mobile app for labor ward nurses to better manage patient care during delivery.
One of my technical specialties is the care and feeding of big old codebases. I've written about modernizing Javascript in such a codebase (part 1, part 2, part 3) and about designing and maintaining graphing capabilities in an Android application. I also sometimes write about software engineering on my own time.
I've been primarily into django for the last decade or so. My longest-running personal project is a web app for curating a personal music collection, which I continue to develop and use on a daily basis.
My highest-turnover personal project is tracking workouts, which had a Rails incarnation, then a D3 incarnation, and is now redone in React and a smidge of python.
I'm currently studying sociology part-time. I'm broadly interested in medicalization, monogamy and nonmonogamy, decisions around childbearing, and just about every new paper I read.
I gravitate towards quantitative methods and data visualizations - not surprising in light of my engineering background. My first paper is a visualization of sexual lifestyles in the United Kingdom, comparing people's current lives with their imagined futures.
I'm interested in how humans interact with technology, which has led to a lot of front end projects and to a degree in human-computer interaction.
My most entertaining project during that stretch of grad school was an app to simulate a piano and generate sheet music. I also got into Processing for a while, mostly creating running-related visualizations: a simulation of the 2009 Boston marathon and a training poster for the San Francisco Marathon.