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 lead developer for SureAdhere. 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 work on software for video directly observed therapy, used to support tuberculosis treatment and similar regimens. Prior to that, I've worked in a variety of areas in Dimagi. I've been a prolific contributor to CommCareHQ. One earlier project that remains close to my heart 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 most active 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 was a visualization of sexual lifestyles in the United Kingdom, comparing people's current lives with their imagined futures. My main works in progress are a project measuring how parents' political views change when their first child arrives and a project exploring the motivations and behaviors of people reducing meat in their diets.
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.