About
Hey, hello! I’m a human bean who’s trying to be unapologetically myself in this messy world. I’m always healing, creating for myself, and causing good trouble.
Communities are the most important thing we can build, and they’re what continue to energize me as a community organizer. I grew up in a low-income Việt refugee family in Toronto’s Little Tibet and Little Jamaica neighbourhoods, raised by my incredible mother and grandmother, who — alongside my amazing sister — fights for disability rights for my brother and our community. I’ve written and spoken about my experiences with disability and mental illness, organized for disability and transformative justice through grassroots movements and in the tech industry, and facilitated peer support groups and mental health education classes for queer and trans Asian and Pacific folks and the Southeast Asian refugee diaspora.
I created if-me.org, an open source nonprofit that builds a mental health communication platform and amplifies community activists and organizations. Since 2014, the project has had hundreds of contributors from around the world, and the app has been translated in various languages. The project paved the way for inclusive, social impact open source projects on GitHub and is part of the Digital Public Goods Alliance.
Like many femmes and queer folks 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 with specializations in Society, Technology, and Values, Sociology, and Religious Studies from the University of Waterloo in 2016.
I’m a senior staff / principal engineer who’s been working in the tech industry since 2011. I’ve worked at Shopify, Mailchimp / Intuit, Headspace, Indiegogo, Expedia, Minted, ThoughtWorks, Communitech, and Workopolis / Indeed. I currently work at Maven Clinic. 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.
For over a decade, I’ve been mentoring, sponsoring, and coaching folks in the tech industry, particularly folks from underrepresented communities. I’ve helped to lead the University of Waterloo’s Women in Computer Science Club and the San Francisco chapter of Write/Speak/Code. At many of my jobs, I’ve founded and organized employee resource groups focused on disability and mental health.
I’ve written for publications like Model View Culture, Shameless Magazine, and AJ+. I’ve been a speaker for Prompt and Open Sourcing Mental Illness. I’ve spoken at conferences around the world, like Lead Developer, QCon, and Dreamforce on software engineering, open source software, and mental health.