I didn’t grow up very wealthy. For most of my life my single mother, twin sisters and myself relied on government assistance to get by. Whether it was “food stamps,” educational assistance or free lunch we relied on it all to get by and excel.

For a large portion of my life my mom worked for my home county’s mental health department as a clerk. Sometimes I’d go there after school which let me see one more way our government provides services for some our most vulnerable. Then, she began working in a prison and I saw the opposite.

When going to school for computer science I wasn’t completely sure what I wanted to do with my degree. I knew something within government was likely what I’d do but not exactly sure what. By the time I graduated I found myself learning how to reverse engineer malware and performing a 20 minute talk to my peers on using machine learning to deobfuscate malware. When I graduated I was told about an opportunity for a company that might be something I’d be interested in by a friend. She helped me get connected and I applied for the role of Support Analyst for CalSAWS.

To be completely honest, I had no idea what I signed up for. I just wanted to make more money and move out of my hometown. I commuted for 5 hours daily for work until I saved up enough to get my first apartment in Sacramento, CA.

During my first role with Accenture on the CalSAWS project, I took what I learned from Geek Squad and school and married them together to provide the best support I could. I’m a solutions based person. I search for ways to automate tasks, permanently fix a problem or at the very least mitigate a problems impact.

My first large solution within 2 months of working on the project was baking our receipt printer settings into the string being sent to the printer. The devices I supported are public facing devices and have power outages regularly. When this would happen sometimes the printers lost their cached settings. By moving the settings into the string of the receipt they’re set per print and takes one more step out of the new machine setup process.

During college I always excelled in my writing courses so in my free time I’d pick up old documentation and update it to current formats, processes and more accurate referenced information. Eventually when leaving the team and handing off the work to the new vendor I was commended for the amount of thorough documentation I had kept for each process and device whether it be ordering supplies or troubleshooting a service outage issue.

During my time on CalSAWS I would visit each counties Human Services office to help integrate our tools into their business process, teach how to use and troubleshoot customized devices, and take feedback to help provide enhancement to devices. This meant extensive time being spent in Human Services lobbies viewing how the general public interfaces with the devices and helping them when needed. I grew to learn Human Services well enough that I could help in any office in the state. Which allowed me to travel all over an experience all of California’s amazing nature, people and cultures.

Over time vendor dependance on a system became an issue for reliable uptime. I downloaded the code repo and began reverse engineering the vendor’s API. After a couple days I figured out how it worked and spent the week recreating my own solution. I presented it to my boss and leadership who liked the new solution but was turned down by the client. No big deal to me, I learned something new anyways.

I continued to take a more leadership approach and taking charge of issues I wanted to see from beginning to end. When I build a relationship with an employee for a client or the client themselves I like to be there for every step of the process to let them know I’m there if they ever need me. When the effort is complete I always ask if we met the end result and if anything could have gone better. Creating a seamless pipeline my clients can trust is there to support them is one of my top priorities. Client trust goes a long way and you never know when that regular employee promotes to become a decision maker.

Eventually when reaching a huge system migration effort to bring in new counties under the current system, my team structure had completely changed. Everyone from my original team left and I was left to bring new leadership and coworkers up to speed. During this time I had also newly come out as transgender at work and was learning new ways to interface and interact with others that felt more me while adjusting to my new work environment.

I began leading efforts to migrate counties from the old services and apps and devices to the new ones which meant interfacing with each county’s network, security, IT, project management and sometimes facilities teams.

The devices I managed were printers, tablets, number calling systems and kiosks with multipage scanners. The kiosks are public facing devices that allow for check-ins and document uploads. The tablets were line buster devices meant for tackling lines that stretched around the building before the doors at 8AM. The printers were a backup solution so that reception could re-print receipts. When installing any kiosk(s) many things needed to be considered such as if the building needed special permission to install concrete anchors to keep the kiosk(s) in place. I’d help run weekly, or bi-weekly depending on the need, meetings to make sure everyone was apprised of the current status of each task and create a timeline the client was happy with that met their goals.

Like all devices, eventually components are end of life’d. A printer manufacturer for the kiosk was sunsetting a device we relied on so I researched a new one and engineered new functionality into the kiosk app to call the new printer and build a receipt in its proprietary machine code. Other components haven’t had the same issue and have just needed rounds of equipment refresh to keep them up-to-date.

When on client visits I would take my new coworkers with me and teach them how I interface with the clients and perform demo’s. Making sure they find their own way to present the information effectively but have their own flair to it, making it theirs. I did this a few times with each coworker to make sure they can handle the environment well. Working in Human Services can be challenging, adding tech on top of that stress doesn’t make for the most stellar environments. I ensured my coworkers couldn’t just keep a situation calm, but could deescalate situations if needed as well. I’ve personally dealt with harassment in the lobbies and know things can get tense.

As the team grew into their skills I began to take a more hands off approach to the daily support piece and client visits to help with more project management and infrastructure changes. I created and processed change requests for the incoming changes to make sure they made it through all their reviews and got approved. Due to my writing skills and deep knowledge of the system I was brought in to help with creating and processing Plan of Action Management (POAM) documents. After all the paperwork was done I stood up the new management infrastructure and began teaching the team how to migrate devices. Once the team was humming along with that project I moved on to helping the new system test team so that they could understand how to test each piece of functionality and service for the devices to release that responsibility from my team.

Not long after, the client pushed forward on a modernization effort that meant giving our apps much needed care. I’m the team’s subject matter expert and was a part of the design discussions to make sure all of the client’s needs are met. Once design was complete, and it had gone through multiple rounds of committee reviews and votes, it was time to begin development.

I shifted away from standard role and began helping dev the new apps while staying around to answer questions anyone had about my previous responsibilities. Rebuilding the app that I spent so much time helping support and enhance has been fun. Making software take action with hardware feels like magic and I can’t get enough of it.

As of now I’m still completing my dev work but have been told that now it’s time to find my next roll as our contract is coming to a close. Working on CalSAWS has been truly humbling and in my own way how I give back to something that took care of me. I’ve always said I don’t like doing soulless tech work and that I prefer to do something with meaning. I can say I’ve definitely done that and excited to take what I’ve learned to go help more people.