Tracy Hinds
Product | Operations | Community
tracyhinds@gmail.com
tracyhinds.com
tl;dr Tracy is the Head of Platform at Samsung NEXT. She is using her passion for startup engagement, cultivated in her prior work as a web and product engineer, community builder, and strategist to build a service platform that provides portfolio companies resources, value-added services, tools, and access that leverages the unique strengths of Samsung to help teams succeed and scale. Tracy holds a B.S. in Experimental Psychology from the University of South Carolina and serves on the Node.js Foundation Board of Directors.
Now, her years of experience working with technical people, ideas, organizations, and communities has her looking for an opportunity that will not only take her career to the next level, but will allow her to positively impact lives at a larger scale
Head of Platform
Samsung NEXT - May 2018 to Present
Head of Product and Community, compretend
Samsung NEXT Accelerator - January 2018 to May 2018
As Head of Product and Community at compretend, I established and executed processes and best practices in operations, hiring, product development, and engineering centering around a startup tackling machine learning education and components platform for web developers. Through foundations in putting users first, I gathered data on product/market fit while developing our initial product for beta launch and user testing.
Node.js Foundation Education Community Director
Linux Foundation - March 2015 to January 2018
As Node.js Education Community Director, I grew the global 9 million user Node.js ecosystem through improving the way developers learn Node.js and other programming languages by leveraging the power of open source and community. I consistently worked to align corporate and individual members of the programming ecosystem to maximize contributions both monetary and volunteer-based. I identified needs of the project, Foundation, corporate members, and ecosystem to design programs that amplified their value. I presented, negotiated, and executed initiatives through the Board of Directors to drive our mission forward. I designed and lead the first Node.js Certified Developer certification program while gathering a vendor-neutral open source contributor base to build it. Diplomatic outreach, conflict management of contributors, and education of the need for this work was a vital component to succeeding in these efforts.
President
GatherScript - October 2015 to Present
As president of GatherScript, a registered 501(c)(3) supporting inclusive developer communities with educational events by providing a financial umbrella and advisement, event project management resources, and organizer recruiting/retainment, I specialize in fundraising, advocacy, board management, coaching, capacity building, and governance management of our umbrella organizations. I refine and implement the strategic plan we’ve set while ensuring that the budget allows the flow of funds to make continuous progress. I establish and deliver on the long term strategy of our mission–a better tech world. As part of this umbrella, I have overseen management and execution of 10 developer-focused community conferences since 2014.
Front-end Engineer
IBM Watson Health - August 2015 to March 2016
I was a Front-end Engineer at IBM Watson Health. I was responsible for building user-centric UX for all core products being built under the Watson Health organization using vanilla JavaScript, Sass, and HTML5 while prioritizing HIPAA/international compliancy and accessibility standards and providing a unique vertical domain expertise due to my prior work in healthcare administration. In my cross-functional role in product engineering, I built a bridge across the engineering and design teams in Watson Health, establishing best practices for the newly formed Watson Health organization, and building curriculum to establish a foundational knowledge of healthcare to onboard those without vertical experience and a common vocabulary through educating non-technical roles in development tools.
Web Engineer
Urban Airship - January 2013
I am a remote Web Engineer at Urban Airship. I am one of 5 engineers responsible for the CommonJS-like JavaScript codebase. I maintain and build new features for the go.urbanairship.com UI by leveraging the powerful API our customers use to send mobile messaging. My work has included a revamp of our JavaScript Testing using tape, growing in confidence with core development tools such as git, publishing Node.js modules to npm, understanding the choices behind our move from an in-house templating engine to Ractive, and working independently on customer facing features. I actively work to maintain a positive relationship for Urban Airship with the community through the organizations I help run and evangelism of our work.
Organizer
EmpireJS, EmpireNode
empirejs.org, empirenode.org
2014 to present
I am co-organizer for the Empire code conferences, a community-driven NYC metro group of conferences currently focusing on JavaScript and Node.js. Responsibilities include keeping all aspects of planning and implementation running smoothly and on-budget through the conference event, building tools to help streamline our work, connecting with those who can best represent and share knowledge, and outreach to build a more diverse community through the conference attendees, speaker set, sponsors, and staff.
Curator, Organizer
CascadiaJS
cascadiajs.com
2014 to 2016
I was the 2014 Curator, 2015, and 2016 co-organizer for CascadiaJS, a community-driven Pacific Northwest JavaScript conference. Responsibilities included keeping all aspects of planning and implementation running smoothly and on-budget through the conference event, documenting processes to help encourage other events, connecting with those who can best represent and share knowledge, and outreach to build a more diverse community through the conference attendees and speaker set.
Organizer, Cat Herder of Organizers
PDXNode
PDXnode
I spearheaded the coordination of the Portland Node.js user group. This included planning events, finding venues, wrangling organizers, recruiting great speakers and good content, marketing, and gathering/gauging interest for events we were creating. We offered monthly presentation nights, hardware hacknights, Code & Learn, and nodeschool.io workshops.
Event Organizer
PyladiesPDX
I began hosting the Saturday Code & Learn for PyLadiesPDX after I recognized a need for a weekly informal Third Place where women could gather to help each other progress through projects related to Python.
TALKS
Merge Conflict: A case study of peer conflict management in open source communities
As the education community manager of Node.js, contributor to the project, and Moderation Team member, I proposed and coordianted the conflict management training program for Node.js leadership and collaborators–those who keep the project ticking for millions of users of the project. In tech, we don’t include the experts that are needed to solve these problems and we desperately need them–so we’re doing just that. In this talk, I walk through applying this education to OSS developers distributed across the globe, and report on how this can remove barriers to stability for projects through improving development productivity with healthy communication and collaboration–peer conflict management.
Communities, Conferences, & Donuts: do you really want to know how they are made?
Founding, running, maintaining…conferences! What does it mean to maintain a conference? What does it mean to the organizers, and also the community it benefited, to retire one? Different geographies and cultures allow for experimentation, risks, failures, and successes on the human-centered projects that Catherine Lopez and Tracay Hinds have been working on for years. An ever-expanding story of growing more caring communities through the trials and tribulations of A/B testing experiences within Cascadia, EmpireJS/Node, JSConfCO, ScaleConf, and and code project communities such as Node.js.
The JS Party, episode 8: "Good Documentation, Non-blocking UI Rendering, and Node Community Updates with Tracy Hinds"
There Are No Mistakes, Only Lessons: Learning in Node.js
A talk given at Node Week 2017, a week-long series of talks by the Node.js community. Last winter, the Node.js Foundation expanded its annual user survey to encompass and unravel who and how programmers are learning Node.js and using alongside other languages. This talk explores the Node.js user, a global landscape attempting to learn Node.js despite English not being their spoken language of choice.
KEYNOTE: The Road Forward
A talk given at Node Interactive North America 2016 about the history of the Node.js community, its legacy, and how the strategy for future inclusivity work within the Node.js project could help strengthen and grow the ecosystem.
New Node.js, who dis?: It takes a global village to raise a community
A talk given at JSConf Colombia in October 2016. Node.js is 7 years old now and the Node.js Foundation just celebrated its first birthday. Let’s take a look at how it came to be, how the fork was great for us, how the Node.js Foundation(what the heck IS it?) is a large collaboration to grow and maintain the health of the project, and how flawed we are in all of these efforts(recognizing this is how we improve). We’ll talk about how we are fixing it even though other communities look to us as a model, and how every facet of the projects has to step up in order to make all of these changes a success.
Moderator and panelist: Facets
Facets is an interdisciplinary creative coding, interactive art, and videogames unconference. The session, “How Do We Open Source When We Are Called Ninjas?”, was contributed by the expert panelists David Huerta, Alex Qin, and Rachel White.
Git for Designers
An interactive walkthrough series built for an audience of folks new to Git/GitHub who want to collaborate with developers neck-deep in a GitHub workflow. Series were first taught at IBM Watson. Repo available upon request.
JSConf US: Last Call
Emceed alongside the loveliest Zahra Jabini
Failing & French Macarons
A passion talk given at ManhattanJS 2015 on taking big risks and my endless endeavors around not running a bakery.
Rewriting Recipe Search: A dash of sugar, just a smidgen of graph database
A talk given at JSConf 2015 on online recipe content, better search discovery, and schmutzing around with graph theory, Neo4j, and some JavaScript to enable my endless endeavors around cooking and not running a bakery.
Use Your Words
A talk given at ThunderPlainsConf 2014 and at Brooklyn.js in December 2014, about the responsibility of kindness in your community as an individual, online, at events, and leading.
Merge Conflict: Conflict Resolution for Programmers
A talk given at LXJS 2014 that applied crisis and conflict resolution training to the in-person and online world of miscommunicating programmers.
Punching Rocks: Bloody knuckling my way through rock climbing and programming
My first-ever conference talk given at NodePDX 2013 on the challenges a career-transitioning programmer will face, and the similarities with rock climbing that can help one prevail.
PROJECTS
Recipe modeling exploration
github.com/hackygolucky/recipe-modeling
A work-in-progress using Node.js, Neo4j, and a number of publicly accessible recipe APIs to explore online recipe content, better search discovery, and schmutzing around with graph theory to enable my endless endeavors around cooking and not running a bakery.
Currently a private repo, available on request.
How to Conf
github.com/cascadiajs/how-to-conf
A detailed manual on how to plan and execute a community-run conference, including a master spreadsheet to manage budgets $100,000+. Many of these conferences have supplemented organizing software with GitHub and tools that we’ve created in order to make this very large-scale process manageable with an extremely limited-size team.
GitHub Issues Exporter
github.com/empirejs/github-issues-exporter
A command line tool to export all GitHub issues in a given repository to .xlsx file format but built to soon support various formats.
Pong
codeskulptor.org/#user5-EWfMN73AnX-42.py
A pong simulation game coded through a GUI developed by course instructors at Rice University for Coursera.org . This was a mini-project assignment completed for the Interactive Python course.
Memory
codeskulptor.org/#user6-iNlDvUsbSg-95.py
A Memory simulation game coded through a GUI developed by course instructors at Rice University for Coursera.org . This was a mini-project assignment completed for the Interactive Python course.
Education
Code Academy
codecademy.com/users/tracyhinds
Successfully completed the Web Fundamentals course, and the Python beginner’s track, with mini-projects completed as well.
Coursera
- Computer Science 101: Experience with image processing via javascript
- Health Policy and the Affordable Care Act
- Interactive Python games programming
- Networked Life
Certificates are available, at request.
University of South Carolina,
BS, Experimental Psychology
Coordinated research and lab involving emotional intelligence in youth as it pertained to correlations of future deviance, especially in regards to substance abuse as a young adult.
Past Work Experience
Polyclinic, 2011-2012
As a Patient Services Administrator, I became the point of contact for troubleshooting during EMR migration from a paper clinical system. I was wholly responsible for coordinating the diagnostic testing scheduling across multiple systems to ensure accuracy. During my time at Polyclinic, I identified and corrected a loophole in the office follow-up system, creating a new standard for capturing higher client return rate. I consulted with the Clinical Supervisor to streamline anachronistic facility operations.
Parallax Addiction Treatment Center, 2009-2011
As Referrals and Authorizations Coordinator, I created and implemented a new system for treatment authorizations, reducing error to a negligible level. This recovered a $500,000 deadlining gap in revenue that would be unrecoverable after expiration set by providers for the facility. I processed client data forms and maintained up-to-date databases for research analysis through detailed state and federal reporting agencies. Furthermore, I ensured accuracy of clinical authorizations through clarifying collaboration with clinical and business teams.
The State Media Company, 2008-2009
As Majors Advertising Assistant, I was able to efficiently negotiate interdepartmental communications regarding print layout thereby reducing errors and exceeding advertiser expectations. Due to my quick adaptation, three months post-hire I was given added responsibilities for direct client communications and addressing service issues.
Experience prior to 2008 included positions in administration, restaurant management, and customer service. All experiences reinforced the relevance of systems being created to make a better process or experience; and said systems must be examined and evaluated regularly with changes to be made if necessary.
References, available at request.