being the wandering toolmaker

After being an senior-ish software engineer and a team lead (like a tech lead elsewhere) for five years, I've been working as the first "wandering toolmaker" at NoRedInk. In this role, I'm spending about half of my time working on the product (mostly focused on improving life for ELA teachers and their students) and the remainder working on improving tooling and developer experience for the department and company.

So far, I've:

• added Sorbet to our Rails monolith and got almost all (over 95%) of our code to typed: true levels of checking.
• created tools to help our accessibility team educate the company how to make our site more accessible
• explored alternate build tools like rbt

I'm currently in the process of converting our JavaScript code (the stuff that we use to start our Elm apps) to TypeScript and working on bold.