Janice
Kyla Nascimento
Smith Engineer. Adventurer.

> whoami

Greetings! I'm Janice K. N. Smith.

I design, architect and develop performant, resilient and maintainable systems as well as support, develop and grow a strong, a self-directing technology team.

I am currently building projects as the CEO and Founder of Foxglove Technology.

I have launched external facing portals to better facilitate communication with external users for the Forward Financing team and also developed a common library of components to present a unified UX experience for users across the various tools.

I prototyped and refined a new React and Redux frontend architecture for relaunch of flagship site of America's Test Kitchen.

When I'm not working on software, I'm enjoying producing great food for my friends and family, taking my dogs on long walks/hikes, listening to my tunes on vinyl.

In my former life I was a Biotechnologist working on improving lives with science, receiving a B.S. in Biotechnology at the Rochester Institute of Technology and my M.Sc in Biotechnology at UC Irvine.

> janice --skills

  • JavaScript ❱ React ❱ Redux ❱
  • Ruby ❱ Ruby on Rails ❱ Postgres ❱
  • git ❱ github ❱ heroku ❱

> janice --creds

Technical Lead and Founder

A stealth mode tech startup

May 2019 to present

My background is in leading engineering teams with a combination of colloabortion and detailed deep dives into the problems we are sloving. I have a huge amount of love for technology but more than anything I build solutions.


Senior Engineering Lead

Forward Financing

December 2018 - May 2019

I design, architect and develop performant, resilient and maintainable systems as well as support, develop and grow strong, a self-directing technology team.

  • Lead effort to characterize and identify opportunities to strengthen technical foundations of core business application workflows resulting in a successful plan for ecosystem wide re-architecture
  • Reinforced core engineering practices to maintain full retention on a team of over 25 engineers

Senior Engineering Lead

Forward Financing

December 2018 - May 2019

I design, architect and develop performant, resilient and maintainable systems as well as support, develop and grow strong, a self-directing technology team.

  • Lead effort to characterize and identify opportunities to strengthen technical foundations of core business application workflows resulting in a successful plan for ecosystem wide re-architecture
  • Reinforced core engineering practices to maintain full retention on a team of over 25 engineers

Team Lead and Senior Engineer

Forward Financing

December 2017 - December 2018

Helped push the boundaries of the current technology ecosystem at Forward Financing so we can better serve and help our clients, as well support all our internal teams.

  • Executed technical interviews to grow a robust and balanced Engineering Team from 5 to 20 in under a year
  • Ensured personal success of individual team members through one on one meetings
  • Strengthened team dynamics with over 90% retention rate with clearly set goals and expectations
  • Developed of high value/low risk features for external partners
  • Realized co-op program to support interns in becoming individual contributors for key business features

Software Engineer

Forward Financing

May 2017 – December 2017

Architected new standards for the front-end ecosystem. Launched the first external user facing application for the Forward Financing team, and worked to iterate on the external facing UX experience.

  • Architected a new React and Redux frontend ecosystem including two external facing portals as well as a shared component library which accomplished the on time launch of the first external user facing application for Forward Financing
  • Set best practices for javascript and css development by compiling a style guide and linting for javascript as well as scss for use across the team which lead to more consistent and maintainable code across the frontend ecosystem
  • Outlined and developed ethos for technical exercises used in hiring software engineers at Forward Financing which was key in the vetting of top performing and collaborating engineers to build a balanced team

Software Engineer

America's Test Kitchen

March 2016 – May 2017

As an engineer on a cross functional team, I embraced working with product, design and marketing to enhance our flagship products. I contributed to the implementation of new JSON API’s in our Ruby on Rails application while supporting our legacy applications. I also participated in hiring, supporting and onboarding both interns and associate team members.

  • Prototyped and refined a new React and Redux frontend architecture for relaunch of flagship site producing a company wide starter kit for the development of React and Redux applications with a Node backend and server-side rendering
  • Successfully brought high performing intern up to speed in React ecosystem and supported that team member in becoming a full contributor to the team on par with all other engineering team members which resulted in increased resources for flagship rewrite as well as a long term hire for the team

Associate Software Engineer

America's Test Kitchen

May 2014 – March 2016

As a member of the Cooking School platform team, my goals included supporting redesign of key features, and overall performance of the application. Working with the senior engineers we implemented a caching system in our view layer and decreased the response time of our API endpoints using customized SQL statements.

  • Working with the senior engineers implemented a caching system in our view layer and decreased the response time of our API endpoints using customized SQL statements to improve performance across the application
  • Contributed to the addition of React to the ATK ecosystem, integrating a React view layer into an existing Backbone application which resulted in successful launch of improved marketing homepage and student onboarding experience

Research Associate

NetBio

November 2011 - December 2013

Organized and executed molecular biology assays to help increase the efficacy of DNA extraction for the identification of forensic samples. This included creating analysis reports and working with other teams to diagnose and troubleshoot critical issues.