Mentions

Work I've done has been mentioned in various articles, books, and other media over time. I gather those here for posterity and as a hedge against my own memory.

"Why is it so hard to make a website for the government?"
(The New York Times Magazine, 2016)

The NYT Magazine did a fairly long piece on our work building GetCalFresh at Code for America at a funny time, a bit of inflection point for the work. Many parts of this experience were odd (check out the spinning banana!) but I also found it a strong piece overall, and a heck of a lark.

Hands down, my favorite quote from this piece is this one:

As lunch wound down, I asked where Dave Guarino was. I hadn’t seen him in a while. “Dave is coding,” Williams said.

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World
(Book, Clive Thompson, 2019)

This book includes a delightful rendition of the story of a particularly odd bug my team encountered with an SMS app for checking EBT balance while I – the person who wrote all the code — happened to be off the grid on an island in the South Pacific. I believe the genesis of this mention was recounting this bug tale to Clive before a campfire after about 1.5 beers at a Foo Camp many years prior.

(Note: I do someday strive to write up my own longer form narrative of what exactly happened with this bug. Paranoid thoughts about some Russian mob connection were, in fact, unfounded.)

Hacking Bureaucracy: Reimagining California’s Food Stamp Program in the Digital Age
(Harvard Kennedy School Case, 2016)

The early parts of our work building and scaling GetCalFresh across California were documented in this Harvard Kennedy School (of Public Policy) study. I know the case has been taught at HKS for some time, and my understanding is it has now been taught in a number of policy schools, including my hometown favorite, the Goldman School at UC Berkeley.

(...this page is a work in progress...)