The purpose of this living document is to encapsulate the various roles I normally play on teams, communication styles, and other areas to help us work effectively together. There are so many nuances to working with people, and I have tried to capture some of mine here.

My goal is to help the team to succeed in reaching their goals. This includes unblocking team members, handling behind the scenes glue work, and working directly with Engineering and Product Managers to assist with roadmap planning. These are some of the priorities I have for projects:

• I prioritize advocating for the integrity of the technology architecture and balancing this with product features. This involves prioritizing the right technical investments which reduce developer or product friction, contribute to the technical or infrastructural scalability, and keeping codebases up to date with current patterns, dependencies, and documentation.
• I believe teams work best when there is a close and healthy relationship between engineering, product, and design. These three dimensions are all necessary to creating a valuable and sustainable product. There will always be a dynamic tension on where to invest energy at a given time. Maintaining this relationship is critical to finding the right balance for the current situation.
• I work to enable team members to do their work and grow in their careers. Mentorship and sponsorship are strong values of mine, especially for those who are underrespented in tech. I thrive in unblocking team members and helping to construct a technical architecture and toolingfor the team to operate within.
• I highly value and prioritize the PR review process and encourage it to not be rushed or looked over quickly. This is an opportunity for us to learn together, identify new code patterns within the project, and see how things can be improved.
• I don't claim to be an expert in all disciplines. If you see a potentially better way to do something please bring it up. Technical discussions are best approached without a sense of ego. From there we can build on each other's strengths, and find solutions better than any of us could have come to on our own.

• I check email, but am much slower to respond there.
• For time sensitive requests I am quicker to respond in Slack or jumping on a quick call.
• If an asynchronous conversation is being drawn out and will be resolved faster with a quick synchronous call, I will typically suggest that
• I heavily use my calendar. Working with various stakeholders, I tend to have a lot of meetings. I also need to maintain focus time to engage in more focused and creative work. If there is a heads down block on my calendar, please check in with me before scheduling a meeting if possible.
• I believe in limiting meeting attendees to the parties that directly need to be present. If an attendee may want or need to be informed, but is not necessary to attend they should ideally be marked as optional.
• I prefer grouping meetings close together where possible. This allows better context management and larger blocks of time for maintaining focus time.

Direct and honest feedback is central to how I work. Being direct and honest is showing kindness to the other individual or team. I appreciate and value companies and teams with a strong feedback culture and work to help foster that environment. These are core tenets I find critical to a strong feedback culture.

• Feedback is timely
• Feedback is respectful and devoid of personal attacks
• We can and do provide positive and negative feedback honestly adhering to the above principles
• Do not do feedback sandwiches (Good, Bad, Good). They are counterproductive. If I do this, please call me out on it.
• Feedback is a gift.

I love getting feedback in either written or verbal form.

• Mentoring, sponsoring, teaching, and knowledge sharing. These were influential for me to switch careers to be an engineer. I love to pay it forward.
• Feedback and team comraderie. Fostering this is a personal priority, and I believe that a team with solid psychological safety works better together with higher morale and better results. We are creatives—-not widget builders--and need to foster collaboration as such.

• Meetings interspersed throughout the day with no significant meeting free zones
• Consistent lack of communication or unclear communication

• I love cycling and am an ultra-endurance athlete. You will probably see bikes in the background of my videos, pictures from adventures, or a predictable answer to the question of what I'm doing on a given weekend. 😀
• I use they/them and she/her pronouns, generally preferring they/them pronouns. Using either set of pronouns is fine, as is intermixing the usage of them.
• I'm Autistic and have ADHD. I find these aspects of my brain beautiful, and they heavily contribute to my strengths as a software engineer. This does correlate to my desire for direct and clear communication. I struggle in bright, loud, and very crowded environments. If presented with these situations I will advocate for my needs with the respective organizer.

I generally aim to work an 8:30 AM - 5PM schedule Pacific time. I normally start logging on around 8 AM, but function best when meetings are not at the immediate start of my day. I occasionally will time shift working hours to take care of my child, take a mental break, etc. When this occurs I let my team know the change of my schedule.

Finding blocks of time to have heads down working time is important to my overall contributions to the team. Solving complex problems is a creative problem at it's core. In an ideal world, I try to have one day a week that is really light on meetings. I generally try to make that day Tuesday, but it is flexible. Otherwise, I will utilized calendar blocks to try to designate focus time. If possible, please schedule meetings outside of these times.