Kaso GAMEGIRL
I'm an engineering leader who constantly has one foot in design and one foot in code
For the last 20+ years, my home has been in front of a screen - whether it's my monitor typing code, a different monitor playing video games, or my tablet drawing new designs - I consume a great deal of screen time. I became addicted to customizing whatever I had with my own designs and details early on, through making my own textures and patterns for The Sims in Photoshop. When a friend suggested I learn Macromedia Flash, it was all downhill - I not only taught myself how to make animations and websites with the then "cutting edge software", I dropped out of my animation program at The Art Institute of CA - Orange County, in order to go all in as a web designer.
After having established a decent fulltime gig as a freelance web designer for a few of years - I even worked as the webmaster for Autograph Collector Magazine - the Apple iPhone came out, and marked the eventual downfall of Flash. I went from convincing clients their website needed Flash animations and movies, to recommending JavaScript for all interactivity - as mobile was clearly the future, and that necessitated dropping Flash entirely. I worked hard to teach myself the LAMP stack and built all new projects in that, before getting a real office gig.
I got my big break working for LinkedIn before I had even finished my ICAM program at UC San Diego, and moved up to San Francisco. As a new UI Engineer, I quickly got offers to speak at conferences, write for .Net Magazine, and became a mentor within LinkedIn's WIT group and WEST Mentoring. This love for teaching out and helping others avoid common pitfalls of being a woman in tech led me to engineering management. As the Engineering Manager for the Horizontal UI Engineering team, my love of design and visual arts finally came full circle with my love of engineering. I built a team of web and native mobile engineers that were "Happy Warriors" (thanks Tom Dale) passionately defending the frontend - establishing best practices, building accessible UI components, and ensuring a consistent look and feel across all products and apps at LinkedIn.
When I became the Senior Engineering Manager of the Web Platform team, I led the strategy for all JavaScript frameworks and associated tooling, such as TypeScript migration tooling, internationalization and localization translation libraries, Ember Data and GraphQL libraries, and the companies custom SSR framework.
My senior project at UCSD was RossBot - an iRobot Create with a Raspberry Pi serving a chat client and taking instructions on what to "draw". It was on display for two days at the Visual Arts Dept gallery, where users could "chat" with Bob, and their requests were parsed and matched with a script I had prewritten for the bot to execute - including singing the Imperial March from Star Wars. I won the ICAM Innovation Award for this in 2014.
Despite not having much time to code as a manager, I found ways to inject creativity and design into my job. I designed company shirts for Pycon and SRE Con, and made stickers for every team, project, and event I managed. I even designed and gifted a blanket and beanie for four teams after we "survived 2020".
The web has always been a wild west, and web development continues to be, especially on the frontend. JavaScript frameworks and libraries continue to churn and evolve every year, with a new batch of hotness taking the industry by storm just as you have mastered the last batch. My love of Flash transitioned into love of PHP, then into a love of Bootstrap and jQuery, then EmberJS, and then a love of React and TypeScript; but what this all really shows is my love for tinkering and playing around with new tech. I have always loved playing with Arduino's and Raspberry Pi's, making Roombas' do my bidding, or giving an arcade cabinet new life. Always learning and playing with the new hot thing, and finding new ways to improve on old habits, as well as customizing the look and feel, is what drives me everyday.
I like talking to folks, and if after all this chatter you care to chat some more, hit me up!
Feel free to message me on LinkedIn or email me at mackovision@gmail.com.
If you are curious what this website, or myself, is using - check it out!