Introductions

[ben-pr-p]

Hey developers interested in contributing!

Post a little introduction here, and we'll chat and get you working on things that you're either good at and love, are interested in, or want to learn.

Please include your name, a brief description of your experience, what you'd like to work on, and one super dope campaign tech idea (optional).

[ben-pr-p]

Hi! I'm Ben, and I'm a full time developer with Brand New Congress. I'll be communicating with the rest of the organization to gather tech priorities and coordinating volunteer efforts.

I have a tendency to prematurely optimize little things like bundle size, execution concurrency, and caching, so sometimes I need to be stopped and told that things are good enough. I recently went through a phase where, after learning Lisp, I wrote Javascript with as few braces as possible, which meant everything was a single line anonymous function. I also developed this atom plugin for optimizing NodeJS execution on V8 versions with Crankshaft, and then Google developed Turbofan.

I am most comfortable with full stack MERN (MongoDB, NodeJs, Express, React), but I recently dived into Elixir and Phoenix and am enjoying it very much.

My super dope campaign tech idea is an open source monitoring and simulation system that serves as a real time decision aid and alert system for all levels of the campaign (Project Cybersyn for campaigns). A really nice list cutter with Venn diagrams would be cool too.

Everyone else introduce themselves now!

[BenGalewsky]

I'm "the other Ben" - I've been following Brand New Congress since they first launched back in 2016 and I'm so happy to have the chance to contribute to this project!

I'm Data Engineering consultant with many years' experience in databases and back end architectures. I've built numerous data warehouses, extract/transform/load pipelines and Hadoop architectures for various corporations.

Recently I've been learning elixir Phoenix for the National Voter File open source project.

I'm very comfortable with

• Scala
• Java
• Python

Getting better with

• Elixir
• Javascript

[seangtkelley]

Hello! I'm Sean Kelley and I've discovered Brand New Congress through Justice Democrats and I am in love with their work. I am beyond excited to contribute in any way I can.

I'm currently studying Computer Science at UMass Amherst but I've been developing outside of school for years. During the school year, I'm a Junior Developer with the IT Department where most recently I finished implementing automated browser testing with Selenium, Headless Chrome and BitBucket Pipelines.

Unfortunately, most of my experience is with MVC frameworks like Laravel, Django, and Ruby on Rails but I'm always ready to pickup new frameworks!

At the moment I'm drawing a blank for super dope campaign tech idea but @ben-pr-p I definitely like yours! I've always wondered if a system like that could even be used to simulate the effects of diplomatic decisions as well. In the same way that the National Weather Service uses models to predict how warm air in the Gulf can create a snow storm in Massachusetts, could a model predict how our legislation affects global tensions? Perhaps a bit too Skynet but oh well, just an idea. :)

[seanmacalways]

Hello Everyone!

In keeping with the double-name theme, I'm Sean McFarland! Have been following BNC since its inception, love the approach, though the lion's share of my recent discretionary time has been absorbed in organizing locally with Our Revolution (while partnering with the local BNC folks to host joint phone banks and candidate research events). I'm located in Cambridge, MA, where I am currently a postdoctoral researcher working in the genetics of blood development.

My programming experience is informal and self-taught. For the day job I do lots of analysis in Python. With regard to civic tech, most of my experience comes from the work I did with Laksh Bhasin first on BerniePB.com, and now on GrassrootsPB.com (where we're currently featuring a number of BNC candidates alongside Our Rev endorsees, etc.). Primarily working with Django, Heroku stack, PostgreSQL, and Javascript for visualizations, etc.

Obviously we've got a long list of fun and engaging features we'd like to add to GrassrootsPB, though due to my involvement locally with Our Revolution Cambridge, a lot of my focus recently has been on pulling together a (web-)app that we can use for distributed canvassing (that builds on the Knock Every Door http://knockeverydoor.org deep canvassing model, adding a variety of questions that give us more insight into how to effectively engage our neighbors in work and advocate for them in issues they most care about). Am working on finalizing a first pass at our script right now, and then plan to look into some earlier Bernie2016 endeavors (especially Field the Bern https://fieldthebern.com/) to build the initial prototype. Longer term, would love to generalize it towards something open source that can be easily spun up and used by local grassroots groups anywhere in the country (pipedream to integrate with National Voter File, OSDI, etc.??? :D)

On Mon, Jul 31, 2017 at 4:16 PM, Sean Kelley notifications@github.com wrote:

Hello! I'm Sean Kelley and I've discovered Brand New Congress through Justice Democrats and I am in love with their work. I am beyond excited to contribute in any way I can.

I'm currently studying Computer Science at UMass Amherst but I've been developing outside of school for years. During the school year, I'm a Junior Developer with the IT Department where most recently I finished implementing automated browser testing with Selenium, Headless Chrome and BitBucket Pipelines.

Unfortunately, most of my experience is with MVC frameworks like Laravel, Django, and Ruby on Rails but I'm always ready to pickup new frameworks!

At the moment I'm drawing a blank for super dope campaign tech idea but @ben-pr-p https://github.com/ben-pr-p I definitely like yours! I've always wondered if a system like that could even be used to simulate the effects of diplomatic decisions as well. In the same way that the National Weather Service uses models to predict how warm air in the Gulf can create a snow storm in Massachusetts, could a model predict how our legislation affects global tensions? Perhaps a bit too Skynet but oh well, just an idea. :)

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[wmjbyatt]

Hi there! My name's William Byatt, I work out of Miami. I'm a full-time developer and I do some volunteer progressive activism work. I work with a small software consultancy group that likes to work in domains that'll help push things forward, in both technology and politics.

My experience is primarily in full-stack Ruby on Rails, and I spend far too much time thinking about abstraction and encapsulation. Software design is my jam above all jams. My team's competencies are all over the place: from UX/UI development to functional programming to machine learning and goofy type algebras.

I look forward to working with you all!