Right on Time
What 3,130 knitting designers taught me about breaking into the creator economy
Read essay →Hi, I'm Becca.
I'm a software engineer, engineering leader, writer, and researcher. I use data, stories, and reporting to understand communities and the people inside them.
After about ten years in the tech industry, I've become increasingly interested in the people and cultures that form around the things we make. Lately I've been researching what twenty years of Ravelry can tell us about the changing economics of independent knitting design, and what the language on tech company careers pages reveals about the industry and the people who run it.
Featured Essays
Writing about the strange systems we build around work, creativity, technology, and culture. You can find more of my writing on Performance Anxiety.
Millennials Were Supposed to Fix Work
A 2014 prediction, twelve years of careers-page data, and what worker leverage actually bought us
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It's Not Just a Pipeline Problem
What the Epstein Files Taught Me About the Tech Industry
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Projects
Here is some of the most recent work I have done, professionally and otherwise.
The Closing Window
How has finding an audience changed for knitting and crochet designers? A study of 3,130 designers using Ravelry data and archived pages.
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The Language of Work
I collected a quarter century of tech company careers pages to see how the pitch to workers changes when the job market does.
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Hive-ly
I led engineering for a platform that helped people document problems at work and find resources and advocates who could help.
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Data Visualization, Victory, and the Main Thread
Why do big charts make the rest of a web application slow? My Formidable Fellowship research into SVG, Canvas, OffscreenCanvas, and Victory.
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Speaking & Technical Writing
Talks, podcast conversations, and technical writing about software development and engineering teams.
Design Systems for Data Visualization
Charts often end up outside a team's design system, even when the rest of the interface uses shared components. I talked about how to bring them in, drawing on…
Read more →Adventures with Victory and Canvas
Part two of the fellowship series—using the Canvas API with Victory, trade-offs vs SVG, and the experimental victory-canvas package for performant charts in…
Read more →Data Visualizations and the Main Thread: A (Sometimes) Love Story
Part one of a Formidable fellowship on data viz performance—how an overloaded main thread showed up in a real client dashboard, and what web vitals, frame…
Read more →The State of React State in 2019
I gave this talk at React Conf in 2019, when hooks, Context, and Redux gave us plenty of options for managing state. I wanted to help people understand what…
Read more →Work with me
I’m interested in writing commissions and opportunities to expand on my existing research. I’m also available for talks and podcast interviews.
I’m open to software engineering and technical leadership opportunities, too. If you have something in mind, I’d love to hear from you.
Send an email