Engineering Intern, 2017
Civic Data Project
Where it started: first deploy, first incident, first postmortem.
- Role
- Engineering Intern
- Period
- 2017
- The place
- Civic technology · public-interest data · non-profit
My first engineering role, at a civic-tech non-profit building public-interest data tools. It was a summer of firsts — the first time I shipped something real people used, the first time I broke it, and the first time I wrote up why. The habits from that summer set the tone for everything after.
What I did there
Shipped to production
Built and deployed features for a public data portal, learning what it means for code to leave the laptop and become something a stranger relies on.
Broke it, then owned it
Caused my first production incident and wrote my first postmortem — the moment I learned that a calm, blameless write-up is worth more than a fast, panicked fix.
Found the through-line
Working on public-interest data taught me to care about the humans on the other side of the system, a thread that runs through every role since.
What it changed
- Production deploy
- 1st
- Incident & postmortem
- 1st
- Where it began
- 2017