Maria Vélez

About me

In the first phase of my working life, I was a direct-service social worker that focused on helping marginalized folx address their mental and physical health, personal safety, housing, immigration status, and food insecurity needs. I also worked as a medical interpreter, HIV/AIDS care advocate, financial counselor, and case manager for children and families in crisis. After several years working on the local level on two coasts, I realized the limit to my reach. I felt exhausted and undervalued because both my impact and pay were not where I expected them to be. A chance encounter with a soon-to-be mentor led me to apply to Ada Developer's Academy's highly selective year-long program in 2018. I was lucky to score an internship at a mature startup with brilliant and supportive colleagues; they modeled the day-to-day balance of business needs with a desire to ship code that centered our users. I scored my first role with the same team, focusing on the frontend of a web-based crowd-sourced annotation platform and 2D/3D tooling interface. This platform aided machine-learning models in computer vision used to improve the efficacy and safety of autonomous vehicles. I subsequently survived an acquisition and flourished at a tech megacorp where I was busy integrating the small codebase I knew into a much larger ecosystem and all it demanded.

In 2020 I took a break to prioritize my family's health and well-being. Since then I've had the privilege to reflect on my personal and professional values. I'd love to return to my roots and focus on using my nonprofit domain expertise and technical skills to make a positive impact. I'm motivated to join a people-first company with kind, curious, and diverse colleagues who love what they do and actively help each other grow.

My peers have described me as eager, resourceful, humble, collaborative, and dependable. I strive to be a clear communicator and will readily contribute to your organization's documentation. I am able to work asynchronously, document my ideas, questions and solutions, and self-manage planning of my hours. You can count on me to take ownership of my tasks and deliver them on time. I can reliably communicate when things go wrong and make sure everyone is on the same page when plans change. I will not hesitate to ask for help or come up with ideas to improve the development process.

Though I trained as a fullstack developer, I am happiest in the frontend because its complexity has increased over the years and I know enough to not spread myself too thin. I most comfortable with Javascript, HMTL, CSS, React, Ruby, and Rails. My desire to stay current with the best tools for the job will easily sway me to experiment with new means of tackling a technical challenge. I want to weigh in on tech debt, linters, style guides, pain points, or why we should adopt a new library or framework. I long to create user interfaces that are first and foremost accessible, easy to use, and visually appealing. If the code I wrote is readable, scalable, performant, and a delight to modify, then I feel a deep sense of satisfaction at the end of my work day.

Reverse Job Search

Inpired by Julie Pagano's reverse job post.

TLDR: I am a frontend web dev with 2+ years experience looking for a individual contributor product role at a remote-first mid-size company. Contact me if you are interested.

When - I am looking now! I anticipate spending a month or so on the job search and that timeline roughly translates to a potential start date in September 2023, but I am flexible as it may take longer in the current market.

Location and work hours - I am currently based in Seattle, Washington and am not planning to relocate. I am exclusively looking for jobs that will allow me to work remotely with little to no expectations of travel, going into an office or other in-person meetings. Ideally my work schedule would be flexible, asynchronous-first, with clear expectations on availability within three timezones of Pacific Time.

Company - The dream would be to work at a company with these attributes:

• Values-based, truly mission-driven
• B-Corp Certification
• Has between 50 and 500 employees, low attrition
• Financially sustainable with ample runway
• Matching 401K contributions
• Stipend for professional development and home office setup

Product - Your product must be something that provides a benefit to the planet or its people.

Pros - These industries or sectors will get my immediate attention and will entail the bulk of my job search:

• 'Gov-tech', 'civic-tech'
• Non-Profits
• Education
• Environmental advocacy or climate-change amelioration
• Privacy, anti-harrassment tools

Cons - These are major dislikes if not outright dealbreakers:

• If I will be the first non-Caucasian non-cis male in your team
• Web3, crypto, predatory 'fin-tech'
• Product for military, police, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), or other law enforcement agencies
• Insurance
• Advertising and Marketing
• Low-code roles or ones where I cannot experiment with the latest tech in my field
• Leetcode-style interviews that don't resemble typical on-the-job technical challenges
• Lengthy unpaid take-home code challenges
• Heavy on-call rotation outside of work hours

Questions - Expect me to ask you about the following:

• Specific ways you foster psychological safety
• What are your recent layoffs and how you've managed team morale
• How you've addressed retention and promotion for under-represented individuals
• How you've maintained or improved upon DEI proclamations you might have made since 2020
• How you center user accessibility in all your decisions
• Proactive ways you manage tech debt
• What does documentation of your processes and product look like