Hey, I'm Evie! Welcome to my about page. I generally use this to promote myself when I'm available for my next gig.

In the paragraphs below, you'll find what my core values are in respect to leading teams.

You can also find my work experience, the technologies I've worked with, and some of the responsibilities I've had during this time.

Lastly, I talk about my technical interests, which is basically the things that get me excited about technology and computer science.

If you want to contact me, please use hello@eevie.ro.

My core values

👉 Empathy: I believe everyone wants to do their best. By being honest, kind, and understanding with people, I can empower them to do their best and feel good about the work they do.

👉 Teamwork: Better yet than individuals doing their best is a team that does its best. Holding regular team activities and making sure the team is empowered to make decisions and have its concerns heard is a great way to have teams that perform better than the sum of their parts.

👉 Connection: There’s a lot of depth in both upper management decisions and the work engineering teams perform on a daily basis. It’s very easy for these to become disconnected, and for members of either groups become enstrangered. It’s the Engineering Manager’s job to act as a liason and ensure everybody is aligned and communicates openly and effectively.

👉 Mentorship: Tech is very dear to my heart. And while I have no intention to veto any technical decisions made by my team, I am there to ask the difficult questions, come up with unique ideas and perspectives from my diverse experience, and help the team make the best decisions they can.

👉 Diversity: As a member of multiple marginalized groups, I am keenly aware of the struggles that minorities face in tech. The teams I lead strive to be inclusive, kind and welcoming to everyone. These teams see diversity as power, ability to gain a better perspective and unique views on the problems we face.

My Work Experience

I have been doing tech professionally for over 15 years.

I started my career with C# and Javascript/Typescript developing large-scale web applications and web services. At the mid-point of my career, I decided to switch it up so I picked up Functional Programming through Haskell, Purescript, and nix. I've been working with FP for over 6 years now.

I also have experience with compilers, theorem provers, GraphQL, Postgres, database access proxies and libraries, a solid CS background and a keen interest in theoretical computer science (type theory, lambda calculus, abstract algebra, etc.).

I have more than 7 years of experience in leading teams as either Team Lead or Engineering Manager. During this time, I have been responsible for

🗨️ People: Handle recruitment, hold 1on1s, make sure everyone is productive, happy, and heard.

🗨️ Team: Team exercises and activities, games, help individuals work and act as a team through a strong sense of team ownership and camaraderie.

🗨️ Process: Hold retrospectives, find bottlenecks, resolve team dysfunctions, find creative and team and company-specific ways to improve the way we work.

I have more than 8 years of doing individual contributions as a Software Engineer:

💻 First Principles: I rely on both a strong theoretical background and many years of personal experiences to make informed decisions. I strongly believe in simplicity and clarity of code and using the right tool for the job.

💻 Learning: I learned Haskell, PureScript, Nix, Scala, and Rust, as well as a lot of advanced math topics. I am always learning new things and trying out new technologies.

One fun and recent example is that I've used Lean to solve (the vast majority of) the 2023 Advent of Code problems. Using a theorem prover/dependently typed programming language to work on coding puzzles was a great learning experience.

💻 Presentations: Held multiple presentations at local FP user groups and the local University, work presentations and workships, as well as a talk at Functional Conf about program testing and software verification.

💻 Community involvement: I'm an active member in the FP community, currently holding a position on the Haskell Foundation board.

💻 CI/CD: I'm a strong believer in reproducible builds, easy and predictable deployments, and consistent developer local setup.

My Technical Interests

I am really interested in (theoretical) computer science, functional programming languages, program verification and reproducible builds and deployments.

I am often times using (theoretical) computer science when working on technical projects. Using a common mathematical language that has the benefit of having provable and testable statements can greatly improve technical conversations. I have successfully used theoretical methods to refactor, optimize, and clarify both small and large areas of code. I am mostly interested in type theory, lambda calculus, and abstract algebra.

Functional programming ties in very well with theoretical computer science, and it's generally easier to translate FP to theory and back (it's possible for all paradigms, but FP is closest). I mostly have experience with Haskell and Purescript, but a lot of languages can now be used in a functional style or share a lot of features with functional programming languages (e.g. Elixir, Scala, Kotlin, Clojure, Typescript, etc.).

Most programs have critical paths -- paths that can cause a company to lose a lot of money or even fail of they contain bugs. A lot of companies rely on engineer dilligence and automated testing. And while these are absolutely critical, there's one more kind of verification missing: we can formally prove these critical paths are correct. One great example is Amazon's Cedar Policy Language. It's an authorization policy language that has a Lean-based implementation, proofs-included. This gives a different level of security and guarantees to critical paths.

I really like nix/NixOS. I use it for all my devices, which are highly customized (you can check my github profile's dotfiles for details!). And while my personal use is fun and interesting, nix shines for sharing development environments by pinning dependencies exactly and giving developers confidence that their local build will be identical across devices, team members, CI/CD, and production.

Again, if you want to get in touch, please email me at hello@eevie.ro.