a photo of me, Rachel Kaufman, giving a talk

I’m a full-stack web developer currently working at Attentive, a B2B company in the rapidly growing SMS marketing space. I work primarily in Java, Python and Typescript.

Although I’ve been building websites for ages (geocities.com, IYKYK), my first career was as a science journalist. I loved getting to ask smart people about black holes, rare animals, and the inner workings of the brain. In 2021, I shifted gears and taught myself web development. In early 2022, I started my second act.

I love trying new things and solving big problems, but I also have found I love the little things:

  • writing unit tests
  • finally finding and fixing that one annoying bug
  • creating great design docs

I’ve led projects to build features from scratch (a login system now used by 1,000+ clients, rebuilding an Airflow job to take advantage of its built-in concurrency and shorten a job’s processing time from 6 hours to 6 minutes) and also gotten to work under brilliant senior engineers to improve existing products.

I’m also active as an organizer in Women & Gender eXpansive Coders DC, a local tech group for women and nonbinary people in tech, and on the leadership committee for Attentive Women in Engineering, Attentive’s ERG, where I plan and host events like brag workshops (inspired by Julia Evans), speaker series, and social get-togethers.

I have a LinkedIn page that you might be interested in visiting (note: I mostly don’t accept connection requests from strangers), as well as a Github. Oh, and I give talks, too. Say hello?

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