hi my name is ashley. it's nice to meet you.
i am an engineer/educator/organizer living in ridgewood, queens, NYC.
i currently work as the developer community and content manager at npm, Inc.
Email me!i have been working as an engineer, professionally, for about 3 years. most of my experience has been in web development, primarily in ruby, javascript, and node. i have worked with most server-side and client-side frameworks, including rails, sinatra, express, angular, ember, and backbone.
my current passion in engineering is working on a framework called Endpoints. Endpoints is a hypermedia API framework that aims to provide a convention-heavy paradigm for building node APIs on top of relational databases, leveraging Express, Knex, and Bookshelf.
i am a self-taught developer, and am constantly learning new skills. at the moment i am teaching myself reactive programming.
in addition to my work as a web developer, i also have an academic interest in programming language design, particularly how specific programming paradigms affect the "learn/teach-ability" of the languages that implement them. i have given, and will be giving, several talks on this specific idea at meetups, conferences, and universities all over the world.
for nearly as long as i can remember, education has been a deep passion of mine. i am known to repurpose the famous Dijkstra reference about writing to say, "teaching is nature's way of letting you know how sloppy your understanding is."
immediately after college i became a NYC teaching fellow; i taught middle school science, remedial reading at the 4th grade level, and advanced "test-taking" math. this experience was one of the toughest in my life and taught me a great deal about communication, humility, organizational structures, and of course, teaching.
the vast majority of my career has been spent teaching beginners web development. in my most recent position, i expanded my audience to intermediate and advanced developers. i've also applied my passion for education to technical writing and documentation.
long-term i'm interested in developing tools and workflows to improve the maintenance, accessibility, and discovery of free educational content. in particular, i would like to make a new, and/or leverage an existing, package manager to automate the creation and dependency management of classes, particularly for the beginner web developer.
at the intersection of education and engineering is the infamous tech community. despite issues and complexities, i have dedicated a large portion of my free time to volunteering, organizing, and speaking at user groups, meetups, hackathons, and conferences.
at these events, i primarily find myself advocating for diversity, accessibility, and open source participation. this has taken the form of free classes on git/Github, discussions of codes of conduct, evangelising STEM programs for women, or even just volunteering A/V support for high school hackathon presentations.