Kalil Smith-Nuevelle

Democratic Socialists of America

Led a team of member-volunteer engineers to build and operate my.dsausa.org, a Flask/React app for members to manage their dues payments and personal information and auth.dsausa.org, a Keycloak-based authentication service for the organization.

Maintained existing websites and services, such as:

• A Wordpress multisite network and custom themes/plugins for the national organization and member-run working groups
• Django templates for DSA's membership database (ActionKit)
• discussion.dsausa.org, a discussion forum for members (Discourse server)

Served as a general technical expert on staff: managing DNS for the organization, advising on information security questions, and handling incidents (such as two DDoS attacks during Summer 2021).

Improved the overall reliability of DSA's software by teaching other staff members to use git and implementing a code review and testing process.

Ad Hoc

I was hired to the company's internal infrastructure team where I:

• Mentored junior engineers
• Contributed to the "People" app (React/Rails), which served as a staff directory, automated on/offboarding tool, internal job board and anonymous application review platform
• Added secrets management to the company's internal Heroku-style hosting service
• Created a standardized set of tools for quickly provisioning new AWS accounts to submit technical proposals for government contracts, including a Python CLI tool for initial account setup and Terraform modules for VPC setup, CI/CD, and a bastion host for securely managing SSH access
• Reviewed technical challenges from potential hires

I then joined a contract where I (initially as part of a team of 3 engineers) built out developer.va.gov, the Department of Veterans Affairs’ API platform and was promoted to Senior Software Engineer. On this team, I:

• Had a hand in development of every part of the platform, including a documentation website, an API gateway, OAuth and SAML services, custom monitoring tools, and infrastructure to make API services running in the VA's network publicly available over the internet
• Ensured the OAuth management tools for veterans to revoke application access to their data were usable with a screen reader, including assisting with user research with disabled veterans
• Built tools to protect veterans' privacy, such as a custom Kong plugin to ensure no PII/PHI was logged
• Maintained a custom tool for declarative management of the API gateway configuration
• Created a custom integration between Prometheus and valighthouse.statuspage.io to provide developers with accurate status information about individual APIs
• Open-sourced the code for developer.va.gov
• Configured monitoring and alerting and participated in a 24/7 on-call rotation to meet a 99.9% uptime SLO

I served as one of two infrastructure engineers for medicare.gov/plan-compare where I managed CI/CD tooling for a go API, ETL pipelines, and the plan-comparison React app.

Oomph

• Built web applications for clients with Wordpress, Drupal and React, writing PHP, JS, and CSS
• Tested and fixed accessibility issues on health insurance sites with JAWS and NVDA
• Led a small dev team for an ecommerce site receiving ~400k requests/day
• Wrote new deployment pipelines and improved existing Jenkinsfiles
• Helped train junior engineers

Full stack software development

I have extensive experience doing front and backend development for web applications, command line tools, mobile, and desktop applications. Some of the languages and frameworks I'm experienced with:

• JavaScript and TypeScript (browser/node.js)
• HTML
• CSS (SASS/SCSS and Less too)
• Python
• PHP
• Ruby
• Go
• SQL (PostgreSQL, SQLite, MySQL/MariaDB)
• Lua
• Groovy
• C
• Bash and ZSH
• React
• Rails
• Flask
• Django
• Express
• Wordpress
• Drupal
• Laravel

Accessibility

I'm passionate about making software that can be used by anyone, and I have a deep knowledge of WCAG guidelines that enables me to build accessible software. I also have experience testing software for accessibility issues: both manually with screen readers and through writing automated tests with tools like Jest and axe-core.

DevOps

I'm used to being responsible for every stage of software development: writing code, testing, deployment, monitoring and incident response. I have designed and operated high-availability deployments of applications, and I've been part of on-call rotations for software serving millions of users (such as va.gov and medicare.gov/plan-compare). Besides the programming languages above, some of the tools and services I've used for this work are:

• Docker
• Ansible
• Git and SVN
• New Relic
• Prometheus
• Sentry
• Jenkins
• Travis CI
• Circle CI
• AWS
• DigitalOcean
• Heroku
• GCP
• NGINX (OpenResty, Kong)
• Apache

OAuth/OIDC

I've implemented and operated large-scale OIDC services using Okta, Auth0, and Keycloak. I'm comfortable interpreting technical RFCs (like the various OAuth, OIDC, and JWT specs) in order to design custom auth solutions, including writing documentation for developers, automated testing and monitoring (non-trivial for OAuth services), and designing policies for managing client applications.