Experience
A decade across mobile development, open source, domain systems, and technical support. For a skill-first view of the same history, see the Skills page.
Happiness Engineer — Automattic
June 2021 – present · Full-time · Portland, Oregon Metropolitan Area (remote)
Automattic is the company behind WordPress.com, and it is fully distributed — no offices, no fixed hours, written-first communication across every time zone. I support customers running WordPress.com sites, from people publishing their first post to developers debugging their own code.
- Diagnose and resolve technical issues spanning hosting, domains, DNS, billing, themes, plugins, and the block editor.
- Reproduce reported bugs, isolate the minimum steps to trigger them, and escalate to engineering with the environment detail needed to act on them.
- Translate technical problems into plain language in writing, for an audience whose expertise ranges from none to considerable.
- Document fixes and recurring issues so that solutions carry forward rather than getting re-solved.
- Collaborate asynchronously across a distributed team, entirely in writing.
Domains Guild Lead
2025 – present
Guilds at Automattic are cross-team communities of practice built around a specialty. I lead the Domains Guild, the group responsible for domain expertise across the support organization. Guild members sit on their own teams under their own leads, so the role runs on expertise and persuasion rather than reporting lines.
Systems side. I am the escalation point and subject matter expert for domains: DNS records and zone configuration, nameserver delegation and propagation, registration and renewal, transfers between registrars, auth codes and transfer locks, WHOIS and contact verification, SSL/TLS certificate provisioning, and the ICANN rules governing much of it. I also interface directly with registrars and registries — the cases that cannot be solved from our side alone move on someone else’s process and someone else’s timeline, and getting them unstuck means knowing who to contact and what evidence they need. The cases that reach me are the ones that have already defeated someone else.
People side. I set the guild’s direction and run its regular rhythm of meetings and updates across an asynchronous team, train the wider support organization on domain fundamentals, own and maintain the guild’s documentation as registrar behavior and policy shift, coach Happiness Engineers through live escalations and disputes, and carry recurring customer problems back to the domains product and engineering teams as feedback.
The measure of the role is not how many escalations I resolve. It is how many stop needing to reach me.
Mobile Application Developer — Trigger.Watch
August 2016 – June 2021 · 4 yrs 10 mos · Portland, Oregon Area
Used Java and Firebase to create a mobile API and an Android application allowing users to vote on whether a movie has potentially triggering or troubling content.
- Built and shipped the Android client end to end — data models, voting logic, UI, and the Play Store release process.
- Designed and built the API the client consumed, and evolved it without breaking versions already installed.
- Used Firebase for authentication, storage, and syncing votes so a film’s warnings reflected the whole community rather than one reaction.
- Adopted Kotlin alongside the existing Java as Android shifted, migrating incrementally rather than rewriting.
- Tested and debugged across the range of devices and OS versions real users had.
Paid Intern — GNOME Foundation
June 2017 – September 2017 · 4 mos · Portland, Oregon Metropolitan Area
Used my knowledge of cooking, combined with my experience in C and GTK, to help create a software project for GNOME’s 20th birthday: GNOME Recipes.
Working on GNOME meant contributing in public, to an established project’s conventions, under review from maintainers spread across the world.
Education
- Portland State University — Bachelor of Science, Computer Science · 2012–2016
- freeCodeCamp — Full Stack Web Development Certification, Computer Software Engineering · 2016–2017
Certifications
- Android and Java — TestDome · September 2018
- HTML/CSS — TestDome · October 2016
Languages
- English — native or bilingual proficiency
- German — limited working proficiency