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...)