I'm a civic technologist and policy enthusiast working for the US Federal Government. After over two decades leading award-winning Agile engineering teams building cutting-edge solutions for some of the best-known companies in the world, I turned my skills towards improving government.
At heart, I believe in collaboration, transparency, and equity to make things better - teams, software, and government.
Please feel free to reach me at [email protected]. No sales emails, please!
Highlights
Work
- U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission – Assistant Director, Cloud Center of Excellence
- Federal Secure Cloud Advisory Committee - Appointee
- US Federal CIO Council – Cloud & Infrastructure Community of Practice Executive Committee Member
Previous Work
- Cloud Policy Lead at The Office of Management and Budget (The White House)
- COVID relief programs at The US Small Business Administration
- US Digital Service at the Department of Veterans Affairs
- Government transparency work at Sunlight Foundation & OpenGov Foundation
Projects
- Digital Policy Guide - a brief introduction to key laws, policies, and guidance surrounding the practice of information technology in government.
- EOPbot - a Mastodon bot that posts presidential actions as they happen
- The Civic Tech Webring - a collection of blogs for-and-by civic-tech-minded humans
- Job.Hunt.Works - a website to make job searching easier
Resume
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Assistant Director, Cloud Center of Excellence
Currently, I lead the Cloud Center of Excellence at the SEC, overseeing modernization efforts of our many applications and tools for regulatory oversight. This is a brand-new team at the SEC, responsible for driving cloud adoption and managing our Amazon Web Services environment. We also provide training and resources to the rest of the Commission. In this role, I’ve been able to speed the adoption of modern practices in agile software development, budgeting, and cloud security.
In May 2023, I was appointed to the Federal Secure Cloud Advisory Committee (FSCAC), better known as the FedRAMP oversight board, by GSA Administrator Robin Carnahan. That same month, GSA accepted my proposal for a 10X accelerator project on digital identity and mastodon for government.
U.S. Small Business Administration Chief Enterprise Architect
As the Chief Enterprise Architect of the SBA, I helped to set the roadmap for technology across the organization. As chair of the Architecture Review Board, I worked with agency offices to ensure they were in compliance with Federal law, policy, as well as adhering to the enterprise-wide future state plans. This included the evaluation of new technology solutions, performing analyses of alternatives, and the rationalization of agency system and application portfolios.
Director of IT Services (acting)
For my first six months at SBA, I served as the acting Director of IT Services, managing all of our operations and infrastructure. During the COVID-19 pandemic, I led efforts to keep staff connected and working as the agency rapidly shifted to telework. I also supported implementation of cloud-based services for implementation of the CARES Act, enabling the agency to distribute over $350 billion in loans.
Office of the Federal Chief Information Officer Office of Management and Budget Cloud Policy Lead
As Cloud Policy Lead for the Federal Government, I collaborated daily with White House officials, Cabinet-level CIOs, and practitioners across the entire Federal enterprise to drive modern and mature practices in IT infrastructure for government services. To address the government’s largest barriers to IT modernization, the capstone of my work was creating the 2019 Federal Cloud Computing Strategy, “Cloud Smart.”
In my first year at OMB, I received the prestigious Professional Achievement Award — an honor usually reserved for three years or more of exceptional service — for my innovative, collaborative approach to this work. In 2019, I was also named to the Fed100, after being nominated by my peers both inside and outside of government.
- 2019 Federal 100
- 2018 OMB Professional Achievement Award
- Federal Cloud Computing Strategy (Cloud Smart)
- M-19-19 Data Center Optimization Initiative
- Application Rationalization Playbook
Department of Veterans Affairs United States Digital Service Digital Services Expert
In 2017, I served a tour of duty with USDS at the Department of Veterans Affairs, working to create Veteran-centric, modern services. During my time at the VA, I worked closely with the modernization teams on several initiatives and policies focused on user experience, including identity management & authentication, mobile application strategy, patient scheduling, and open data. This work included evaluation of new technology solutions, policy & user research, and stakeholder engagement ranging from Veterans to senior agency executives.
Sunlight Foundation Senior Technology Adviser
The Sunlight Foundation is a national, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that uses civic technologies, open data, policy analysis, and journalism to make government more accountable and transparent. I served as Senior Technology Adviser through their board transition, working with the Labs Director to shut down their technology program (Sunlight Labs) responsibly. This involved rationalizing and open-sourcing our entire application and infrastructure portfolio containing dozens of applications and tools used by political journalists and organizations worldwide. I transferred our software projects to new maintainers, reengineered our entire IT infrastructure to use commercial off-the-shelf products, and open sourced all of our tools and data under open licenses for future journalists, researchers, and the general public to use. DC Legal Hackers named me Legal Hacker of the Year 2016 for this work.
OpenGov Foundation Lead Developer
The OpenGov Foundation was a small, scrappy organization that worked to create policy and tools for open government and public engagement in law and policy. Founded by former Congressman Darrell Issa in 2013 as a nonpartisan organization to help the public fight the SOPA and PIPA legislation in the House, the scope of our work quickly expanded to open law and legislation efforts nationally and internationally, local to Federal. Acting as our CTO, I worked to grow our team and collaborate with officials at all levels of government to make the law open and accessible to everyone. I also evaluated business opportunities and new technology initiatives, and lead the development of our two flagship applications, Madison and The State Decoded, which are used by governments and organizations all over the world. Our clients included the White House, the United Nations, the Government of Mexico, as well state and local governments including Maryland, Chicago, San Francisco, Washington D.C., and many others.
As part of this work, I was an original member of the Free Law Founders, a national open-law organization of city & state officials and civic nonprofits working to drive open policies and standards. I also served as a subject matter expert on law and legal data to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)’s Web Annotation Working Group.
WillowTree Apps Lead DevOps Engineer
WillowTree Apps is one of the largest and fastest-growing mobile app companies, specializing in creating cutting-edge technology solutions for the most famous brands in the world, including Fortune 50 companies. As Lead DevOps Engineer, I oversaw the architecture and implementation of dozens of projects to deliver high-availability Cloud-based infrastructure and APIs for some of the most popular mobile apps of the day. As our company rapidly expanded, we worked to build an intentional, diverse team by leveraging means such as paid apprenticeships and internships to provide training opportunities to candidates from non-traditional backgrounds.
Boyd Caton Group Lead Developer
BCG is a government contractor focusing on transportation safety & security, with clients including the Federal Transit Administration (Department of Transportation) and WMATA. During my time as Lead Developer, I lead the team working on Federal safety websites, met with top agency officials, lead the rebranding and redesign of our company website, and created a series of cloud-based data visualization dashboards and tools for safety and security information for a variety of audiences.
Hotelicopter Lead Developer & QA Manager
Hotelicopter was a hotel booking startup with over 20 partners and many times the inventory of its contemporary, Kayak. Serving the dual roles of Lead Developer and Quality Assurance Manager, I built several international teams, integrating three shifts across overlapping timezones. I lead the engineering efforts across the entire application stack, from infrastructure to application to user testing. Hotelicopter was acquired in 2012 by a joint venture group consisting of Hilton, Hyatt, Marriott, and others.
Category4 Senior Programmer
Category4 (now called Convoy) is one of the longest-running technology service firms in Virginia. I worked with dozens of clients during my years there, building a variety of applications to suit different project needs. In the time before Etsy and Shopify, we built one of the first reusable, customizable e-commerce website engines, and I created one of the first applications to show real estate listings on the internet. Category4 won the Gold award from the American Marketing Association two years in a row for websites that I worked on.
- 2005 American Marketing Association Gold Award
- 2004 American Marketing Association Gold Award
Munk & Phyber Programmer
One of the first web development companies, Munk & Phyber built some of the earliest e-commerce sites in the world, as well as making sites for local non-profits and artists. M&P was one of the first companies to use PHP – a relatively unknown programming language at the time, but which now powers over 80% of websites in the world.
Freelance Developer
I’ve spent over two decades building hundreds of sites and applications for a variety of clients. Throughout my work, I’ve stayed current with the latest cutting-edge tools. I’ve created plugins and themes for popular content management systems, built custom applications in a dozen different programming languages, and written many articles about various topics from technology to management to data standards policy.