About
Like many queer folks and women of my generation, in the early 2000s, I learned to code as a kid on Neopets building layouts for guilds and other pages. That evolved into building fan-sites dedicated to the masterpiece that is Evanescence, running a web design blog, and working as a freelance developer as a teen. I went on to get a software engineering-focused, co-operative education degree in computer science from the University of Waterloo in 2016.
Today, I’m interested in building ethically-accountable software, leading for stronger engineering foundations, and advocating for better equity and inclusion. I’ve been working in the industry since 2011, and have worked at Maven Clinic (currently), Shopify, Intuit Mailchimp, Headspace, Indiegogo, Expedia, Minted, ThoughtWorks, Communitech, and Workopolis. I focus on developing sustainable engineering methodologies and teaching. I have a diverse set of skills in web and mobile with specializations in front-end architecture, full-stack performance, automated testing, and accessibility. I have been on a variety of teams — infrastructure/platform, growth/experimentation, performance, product, customer support, payments, and design systems. My LinkedIn profile has more details.
I have been mentoring, sponsoring, and coaching folks in the tech industry, particularly folks from underrepresented or marginalized communities, since 2013. I organized mentorship initiatives at the University of Waterloo’s Women in Computer Science Club and was a founding organizer of the San Francisco chapter of Write/Speak/Code, an organization that inspired me to dig deeper into public speaking and technical writing. At various tech companies, I founded and organized employee resource groups focused on disability and mental health justice.
Communities are the most important thing we can build. The communities that have made me continue to energize me to be a community organizer. I grew up in a low-income, Việt refugee family in the neighbourhoods of Little Tibet and Little Jamaica in Toronto and was raised single-handedly by my incredible mother, who, along with my badass sister Jenny, also fights for disability rights for my brother and our community. I write and speak about my experiences with disabilities and mental illness, organize around better access to disability policies, resources, and education in schools and workplaces (in Canada and the US), have facilitated peer support groups, and have taught mental health education classes to young people in the Southeast Asian refugee diaspora. I’m currently am a Healing Justice volunteer for Lavender Phoenix, a queer and trans Asian and Pacific Islander grassroots organization.
I created if-me.org, an open source nonprofit that builds a mental health communication platform and amplifies community activists and organizations. Since 2014, this project has had hundreds of contributors from around the world and the app has been translated into thirteen languages and counting.
I am driven by the sociological impact of technology — how it shapes and redefines culture and identity. I have written for publications like Model View Culture, Shameless Magazine, and AJ+. I’m a speaker for Prompt (now part of Open Sourcing Mental Illness), a community of people in tech who give talks on mental illness. I have spoken at conferences around the world like Lead Developer, QCon, and Dreamforce on software engineering, open source software, and mental health.