Celero

Software used internally to handle all tasks revolving around elections, ballot printing, and processing.

Vocem Online

A web-based service for petition processing challenges that are both secure and intuitive for the voters.

With this being a new team, we had a lot more leeway to create best practices within the team without the baggage of legacy technology or previously engraved team practices. As a result, we create a team that had proper scrum principles before any of the other, long standing teams and projects. In my previous teams, there was usually a mix of agility methodology and a previously established team practice, so this was the first time I was able to get an actual example, with practice, of a scrum team.

I learned a lot about holding myself accountable for the work that need to be done and being part of a team that is delivering a product to our client. The product was for the Boulder Colorado government, which isn’t the first time I’ve worked for a government entity – the first being Arizona’s Office of Tourism. The new aspect for me was working almost entirely remotely. Fortunately, working with a great team allowed us to foster a flexible environment that worked seamlessly, whether you worked remote or in the office.

As for the software, we were on a modern stack: node.js, Typescript, PostgreSQL, React. I’ve worked in a similar technology space, but with this being a service for a government used by their constitutes there was a concern to balance two aspects of the software; We need the software to be secure while not disenfranchising the constitutes. An interesting problem to tackle, having their voters’ registration data and verifying that the user logging in is the constitute registered in their database. The solution we came up with was a step step process: first you type name and phone number into the login screen, we check whether this is valid, and if it is a verification code with be sent to that user via the registered phone either through text and phone call. They gave 48 hours until the code is expired and if you have that code and it is still valid you are able to log in and endorse petitions.

After we released the product to our client, I was the one how took on the transition from active development to maintenance. So I would need to know every component of the service to fix them when things go wrong. The majority of the breaks came from auxiliary services that I never touched during development, but I work need to figure out how they worked and solve the problem I’ve been tasked fix. However, every now and then, our client would add same updates to the service. Overall, it Vocem Online was learning experience for me to be around for all stages of the development cycle.