Jacky Alciné

A seasoned software engineer with a penchant towards libre/free software usage & endorsement across the stack. I work in the United States and operate within the timezone offsets of UTC-8 to UTC-5; I'm willing to work outside of it in a truly asynchronous remote environment.

I'm not currently looking for new opportunities (full-time employment) but I'm down to talk about labor organizing, the open social Web and ways to expand that on a contractual or not basis. Schedule some time to talk.

To make up of the excess wealth capture of cryptocurrency, blockchain, weapons defense, or other knowingly abusive government contract projects since their introduction (and entrenching) into the tech sector, I charge an additional 5% to 15% on projects using, involving or deploying these technologies. As the industry's focused on either that or AI, while inducing a quarter-million people in 2023 like myself to be laid off, this is a simple form of wealth redistribution. Thank you for understanding.

I'm a self-taught software engineer that learns in the open and aims to use or work with open tooling and software. For 12 years, I've worked on a wide range of projects — from billing management, user message multiplexing services and custom user application deployment.

Technologies

These are things I'm familiar (roughly sorted by "expertise"):

Interests

These are things I'd like to incorporate (but aren't required) in my next role:

Roles

The short durations were due to either force reductions or acquisitions that happened over time; clearly not a reflection on my abilities as I've successfully worked with many people.

Plural Policy

TBA!

Code for America

I joined the Tax Benefits team in order to help the effort of maintaining one of the flagship projects, Get Your Refund, an open-source Rails application meant to provide VITA volunteers and sites a means of helping people file for tax benefits.

  • Spent lots of time pairing on features to distribute team's understanding
  • Wrote out documents around changes to the platform to help commodify understanding
  • Spent time working on changes to help reduce noise of the maintaining of vita-min

Eden Health

After learning Clojure on the job, my main role was working on feature development on the core monolith of Eden Health, written in the same. While database work was done using SQLAlchemy, I dipped back and forth between codebases to make changes whenever necessary (and assisting teammates throughout the way). Some of these changes included expanding what registration options patients had in terms of linking insurances and other important quality of life improvements.

Glitch

During my time on the Platform team at Glitch, I contributed to:

  • Refactoring endpoints in the existing API system to a newer one
  • Adding tooling to make internal project statements easier
  • Updating internal clients to make use of the newer API

The stack being completely in TypeScript made it easy for teams to contribute, including myself when it came to working on the frontend.

Lob

I was responsible for improving PDF rendering for clients of their final letters and adding functionality for customers to dynamically add and remove features from their accounts. After working on that, I made vital improvements to how the internal implementations of the payment software worked to allow for a simpler form of usage-based billing.

Lyft

Some of the things I worked on at Lyft were:

  • Working on implementing a message templating system to replace explicit calls to vendors to reach users
  • Added an interface in the internal system to manipulate said templates and make them visible in user profiles
  • Added adaptivity to said tooling to allow for users to adjust their channels for receiving information
  • Added logic to help use less numbers when routing calls between users

Clef

During my time at Clef, I

  • Maintained and added new functionality the Android library (SDK)
  • Maintained the Cordova cross-platform SDK for mobile developers
  • Worked on the core API used by our client applications by improving response times to in-bound requests
  • Moved our development environment to use more virtualization.
  • Worked on the cross-platform mobile SDK for Instant 2FA

Shutterstock

Joining the Contributor team, I assisted in the partitioning of legacy software that made up the Contributor site as well as the implementation of the new Contributor Guides site. I ended up writing out the basis of a functional acceptance test suite for the majority of the Contributor site. Lots of pair programming practices were used here and were heavily encouraged as well keeping the contracts upheld by tests as accurate as possible. Rebuilding the static nature of the Contributor site involved using a cached CMS powered view that allowed product to update the pages without requiring a complete new deploy of the website.

Consulting

I've worked with a range of clients on different kinds of software needs, stacks, languages and with different responbilities. My ability to jump in and get going is one that's kept me going and interesting in consulting. I begun my career consutling and always found it to be a good and exhilarating way to help people build the things they're envisioning and fix the problems that's been ailing them.

Companies I've consulted include the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Color of Change, Paddle8, Whose Your Landlord, BLS, Viridis Learning, Bareburger and Horizon Media.

My preferred working conditions for proposals and contracts:

  • Include my daily rate of USD $500 or hourly rate of $60. I optimize for hourly for short term (less than two months) role and daily for longer term contracts.
  • A maximum of four days worked per week (for work-life balance).

The conditions above can be flexible provided good reason, market stability and personal welfare. Please reach out if you'd like me to work with you (or your organization).