Safety Net

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 survive.

My mom worked for my home county’s mental health department in a clerical position. Sometimes I’d go there after school which let me see one more way our government provided services for some our most vulnerable. Then, she began working in a prison as a nurse, 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 got my degree because I’m passionate about computers and the industry pays well enough to achieve my life goals. I knew something within the public-sector was in my future, but not sure in what way. 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 deep learning for deobfuscation. When I graduated I was told about an opportunity I’d be interested in by a friend. She helped me get connected and I applied for a role with Accenture as a 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 8 months until I saved up enough to get my first apartment in Sacramento, CA.

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

The job was to support and be system administrator for the public-facing endpoints in human service’s office’s throughout California. This included kiosks, worker tablets, number calling systems, a reception log application and a robust but dynamic system to integrate it all. You can click here to find more about CalSAWS.

My first large solution within 2 months of working on the project was baking the receipt printer settings into the string being sent to the printer. The devices I supported have power outages regularly due to their locations power requirements. When this would happen sometimes the printers lost their cached settings when memory drained of power. By moving the settings into the string of the receipt they’re set per print and takes a large 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 them. 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. For my writing and documentation I enjoy building a cognitive experience more than just text on a page. Being intentional to add images with clear markers, hyperlinked caveats and storybook reading styles to give structure and reasoning for processes.

During my time on CalSAWS I would visit each county’s Human Services office to help integrate our tools into their business process, teach workers how to use and troubleshoot the customized devices, and take feedback to make enhancements 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 and experience all of California’s amazing nature, people and micro-cultures.

Vendor dependance became an issue for reliable uptime of the ticket calling system. There were multiple outages without communication from the vendor. I downloaded the repo and began reverse engineering the vendor’s API to see what we could achieve ourselves. After a couple days I figured out how the vendor API worked and spent the week recreating my own solution. I presented it to my lead and leadership who liked the new solution but was turned down by the client to be rolled into another effort. I learned something new anyways and it allowed me to set a new bar for the knowledge I have.

I continued to take more leadership tasks for issues I wanted to see through. When I build a client relationship 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 expectations 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 someone will promote to become a decision maker.

During a huge system migration effort to bring in new counties under CalSAWS, 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 with others that felt more me while adjusting to the new work environment.

I began leading efforts to migrate counties from the old services, apps and devices to the new ones. This meant interfacing with each county’s network, security, IT, project management and facilities teams regularly. Juggling 6 migrations consistently at once was a lot of work but proud that my team was able to keep up.

Instituting devices with each office took patience and care to understand their complete requirements. The tablets were devices meant for tackling long lines that stretched around the building before the doors opened at 8AM. This meant workers could pre-process the line before the doors opened and business could start immediately without a reception queue. When installing any kiosk(s) requirements needed to be considered such as if the building needs permission to install concrete anchors or making sure data and power drops were available. 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 end-goals.

Like all devices, eventually components are end of life’d. Zebra sunset a printer we relied on so I researched a new one. I 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 refresh to keep them up-to-date. This was the first dynamic printing solution that had been instituted in the public-facing devices. Right after this was live I left for back surgery, then not long after I came back I came out at work as transgender. These changes brought a whole new set of challenges and capabilities.

When on client visits I would take my new coworkers with me to teach them how to interface with the clients and perform demo’s. Making sure they are able to present the information effectively but have their own flair to it. I did this a few times with each coworker to make sure they could 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 could keep a situation calm and deescalate situations if needed. I’ve personally dealt with harassment in the lobbies and knew things can get tense.

One situation in particular was extra frightening with someone waiting outside to follow us. This person believed we were secret agents sent to spy on him. My coworker who was much bigger than I am shielded me to create space as we made our way to the car. We laughed off the situation and left for our hotel. However it’s not a situation I thought I’d land in working in tech.

As the team grew into their skills I began to take a more hands off approach of the daily support piece and client visits to help with more project management and infrastructure changes. Picking up all our devices that were split between multiple management solutions and bringing them under the Intune and Entra umbrella was an interesting challenge. We had snags with instituting Windows 10 Kiosk Mode alongside Intune. Making sure specific file locations for drivers and services took effort to whittle down.

After, 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 my team was humming along with that project I moved onto helping the new system test team so that they could understand how to test each piece of functionality and services for the devices. As responsibilities grew we worked to release that responsibility from my team and to the testers.

The client pushed forward on a modernization effort that meant giving our apps much needed care. By this time I was considered the Subject Matter Expert (SME) on all public-facing technologies for CalSAWS and was a part of the design discussions to make sure the client’s needs are met. I juggled helping with the design along with my others tasks before leaving for my first transgender-related surgery. Once design was complete, and it had gone through multiple rounds of committee reviews, it was time to begin development. If you’d like to see the modernization effort you can find it here.

After coming back from surgery I shifted away from my standard role and began further designing, architecting and developing the new app while answering questions anyone had about my previous responsibilities. Rebuilding the apps that I spent so much time helping support and enhance was fun and heartwarming. Making software take action with hardware feels like magic and I can’t get enough of it. Allowing that to truly help others feeds my soul.

The original apps were a java springboot app for the kiosk/windows tablet and an angular app for Android. We migrated all of these into one react.js app to be served in a browser. We faced some particular challenges to when my roll-off would be as we handed responsibilities to the new vendors. Throughout the final phase of this project my roll-off date had changed 6 times. Not knowing when my last day would be made it hard to package and complete my work for each deadline. After some design and integration hurdles our app was complete and ready for production.

I used the remainder of my time on the contract to leave for my second transgender-related surgery. When I came back, I began looking for a new contract but was unable to find one before being let go. As of now I’m building fun and creative personal projects while helping where I can in the hacking community. Working on CalSAWS has truly been amazing and feel incredibly lucky for all the experience I gained. I’m happy my skills have been used to help others and excited for what that looks like next.