Pluribus Digital

As we work to build our community, we’re starting a series to showcase our members. This week we had a chat with Melissa Miller, she’s been a longtime organizer out of NoVA and currently works for Pluribus Digital. She specializes in Ruby on Rails, and is leading a regular series of Craft-N-Crush Your Coding Interview meetups! The next one is on August 18th! Can you share a bit about your background and what led you to pursue a career in tech? I made my first website in high school, but at the time I didn't realize that was programming, and I thought programmers had to be geniuses! When it was time to go to college, I set aside my web development skills and went into journalism. Just as I was finishing my degree, most of the major newspapers collapsed and journalism jobs were almost impossible to get. I found myself in direct marketing, which I didn't enjoy at all. I did that for years until I found myself working in an environment that was very toxic. My spouse helped me talk through what was fun at my current role, and making automated spreadsheets was at the top of the list. He pointed out to me that that was a type of programming! It was then that I remembered my web developer days and I left that job, went back to school, and became a programmer! It was the best decision I ever made! Every day is now fun and rewarding! What inspired you to lead the Craft-n-Crush Your Coding Interview event series? Can you tell us a little bit about these sessions? I started Craft-n-Crush because I was looking for a virtual event I could offer that was low-stress and welcoming to all skill levels. One of our members shared an invite for a similar event in another city, asking if we had anything like that here, and as I absolutely love crafting, it seemed like a great fit! I volunteered to lead our own version with the goal of providing a friendly environment for everyone attending. Some folks sign up to get help preparing for their job search by practicing sample questions and discussing them with the group. Others are there to take advantage of the networking conversations during the crafting portions. It has been a great mix of people so far! What's a challenging problem or interesting project in tech that you've been working on? Currently I'm part of a team doing work for the Library of Congress to help them better understand and improve the research and discovery process for their patrons. Before this contract, I never knew how amazingly rich and complex library catalogs truly were! It's been really fun building prototypes to explore new ways for folks to access that data. You want to build tools that help people find what they are looking for without completely overloading them with the incredible amount of information available. It's a careful line to walk, requiring not just tech skills but also lots of thoughtful user interviews, conversations with experts, and deep analysis.

Following the troubled launch of healthcare.gov in 2013, it was nearly impossible to find the right kind of company that could execute on the concepts of agile delivery and human-centered design — to say nothing about caring about (or, frankly, even acknowledging) end users. Our founding members saw an opportunity to improve how the government delivers digital services by nurturing a sense of community rather than rivalry. Today, five years later, we have nearly 50 member organizations that share our passion for dramatically improving the performance, reach, and customer experience of government services. Learn more in today’s letter from our Executive Director, Traci Walker. https://lnkd.in/gdcCiPDH #digitalservices #digitalmodernization #digitaltransformation #govtech #govcon #governmentservices