Hey y’all! It’s Ajay here. It has been a few months since I have been behind the microphone at think civic because of some travel (some vacation and some work, although mainly I have been traveling to visit family and friends that I have not seen since before the pandemic). As I have been venturing across Europe with brief stops in Africa and Asia, I have been thinking a lot about how my own life path ended up to where I am today. Since being behind a microphone is at times very therapeutic, I decided to sit down this evening in Lucerne, Switzerland and just talk (just me, my microphone, and my laptop) about my own story: how my values were instilled at a young age, my college and Facebook experiences, dealing with ableism at FAANG companies, and finding the civic tech community and workplace that I am so thankful to be a part of to this day. I hope you all enjoy this surprise episode.
Episode credits: Hosted and spoken by Ajay. No writing performed here, this was all from the heart.
All episodes include a transcript of the conversation for our newsletter subscribers. Please find the transcript of the interview below.
Ajay Jain
Hey y'all it's Ajay here. I know it's been a little bit since I have been behind the microphone at our podcast think civic.
As Evan and Chizo have hinted at at in our last episode, I have been a little bit busy traveling the world lately. I went to Istanbul at the end of March to do a little bit of vacation as I got to venture to a country I had never been to before. And for the past few weeks, I have also been in Europe, doing some touring in Morocco, visiting family in Italy, and in Germany, and visiting family friends in England and France. I have absolutely been grateful for the opportunity that remote work and working in civic technology has provided me over the last year, as over the past few weeks, I've been able to reconnect with family and friends that, quite frankly, I have not been able to see in a long time. But like I said, it has been a very long time since I've been behind the microphone. And today I just wanted to spend a little bit of time kind of talking about my own story, how I grew up how I ended up in civic technology, being a technologist dealing with minor ADHD. And in a way, I kind of want this episode that just be a way for y'all to get a better insight into my own story.
We've had a lot of wonderful guests come on the podcast over the last year and a half. And I think one of the big things that we've been able to see as a result is having a bunch of people tell all of your stories as to how they got into civic tech. Hubs are something that I've been wanting to do for a while. And as I've been reflecting over a lot of the tribal lessons that I've learned over the past few weeks and revisiting family and learning a little bit more about my roots is that I also have a story that I want to tell it's a story that I've been wanting to tell for a little bit. And as I've been traveling, I've been reconnecting with my own self and with my own family. It's a story that I want to convey to you all. So today, this episode is just me, my laptop, and my microphone, and maybe a couple of waters a bottle on the side. So I got into civic technology, mainly just because it was instilled in me to always have some sort of impact on my community. I remember in middle school, I got selected for this Northwestern University talent education program, where I took a three week course for high school credit at Northwestern University. And it wasn't the technological or science courses, or anything like that, that it motivated me to go out and learn. It was this course called taking action leadership and service owners. And during those few weeks, I got to kind of see all about what was going on in our communities in terms of social inequality. And it really opened my eyes in terms of not just a privilege that I had as an individual in our society, but also how I could utilize the resources that I had, in order to provide a better impact to tell a better story. And on top of that, to just collectively just give back to my own community using the skill set that I have. In fact, my final project for that class was a little video game that I created in the Scratch programming language, which was one of the things that I also got me into computer science. And it was a game about just giving back to your own community in a bit of a simulation. And that's when I kind of realized that I wanted to continue giving back to my community. During high school, I spent my entire weekends every single Saturday, spending 45 minutes in a car one way at eight in the morning to get to the Museum of Science and Industry on the Southside of Chicago. And I had a bunch of wonderful mentors who instilled the love for science and STEM in me. But more importantly, they instilled the love of giving back to my community at a stem level, I got to teach science concepts to children from all over the world. And I got to help motivate the next generation of young scientists, whether it was just performing a science experiment or acting in a museum theater show as the Texas bubble which is a YouTube clip that I will maybe not show right now but I it has been showed quite a bit amongst my coding it forward friends and I like to think sometimes manifested my own move to Austin, Texas from Chicago, Illinois.
And after spending all of these years, volunteering at the Museum of Science industry, and giving back to my community using the stem skill sets that I had, I went to the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, which as some of you may know, is one
One of the top computer science universities in the entire country and in the world. And as a result, you have a lot, a lot of students come in wanting to compete with each other to get the top jobs. So within a few weeks of going to university of Illinois as a freshman, I'm already going to career fairs, engineering, career fairs, computer science, career fairs, talking to the hottest startups talking to Facebook, talking to Amazon, talking to Google, about getting their attention to wanting them to notice me. And you're competing with hundreds and maybe even 1000s, of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering students just for these companies to notice you.
And this was something that I was doing for a little bit. And deep down, I always felt that there was this missing hole.
And that missing hole was utilizing my technical skill sets to help improve the community around me.
And then I remember in 2016, when President Trump got elected, I woke up the next morning kind of feeling a little bit shocked. And wondering, what could I do as a person to help give those whose voices were being oppressed away to continue speaking up, that's how I thought of it in my mind is a person who was just finishing his first semester of freshman year. And then I thought back to high school, when even though I was captain of my science olympiad team, I always thought that it wasn't my science courses that interested me, it was my AP government, and my US history courses and my social science courses. That was were the ones that I thought were so telling about our society. And those were the ones that interested me. And so I decided my second semester freshman year that I wanted to declare a double major in political science. And on top of that, I knew that my end goal in 2020, was not to work at Facebook, or Amazon or Google, like every other person, in my computer science department, like my peers. For me, my end goal was to work on a political campaign in 2020, to support the beliefs that I had, in order to get President Trump defeated. That's what it was to read. That was the end game. And so I spent a couple of years cultivating up my resume. On the technical side, I did a summer internship between my sophomore and junior year at JPMorgan Chase. And then after that, I ended up living in Washington DC for a semester in, which is probably my favorite semester of college being around for the only time in my collegiate career, just purely political science students who had a very different mindset of the world that was more similar to mine, then my computer science peers at the University of Illinois, who were just more concerned about utilizing the skill sets that they had to just keep power rather than redistributing resources to those who are less fortunate, and working on projects in government, and at startups in order to make the world a better place. They didn't care about that.
And so working in Washington, DC just gave me this idea that reaffirmed my belief that I wanted to use my technical skill set for social good, I just felt that I had to cultivate my resume just a little bit more. And so that's how I ended up at Facebook. Between my junior and my senior year. I chose Facebook for two reasons for that summer internship. The first reason being that Facebook looks really good on my resume. The fact that I had three months of an internship at one of the most prestigious technological companies in the world, would open so many doors for me down the line. But the second thing was that at the time, I thought what Facebook was doing was good. I felt that Facebook was connecting the world. And yes, even though there was valid criticism that I knew at the time, I felt that the positives outweigh the negatives. And then I spent 12 weeks there. As you all know, I've talked about my Facebook experience, a little bit with a little bit of hints and a little bit of disses, I want to talk about that experience a little more, because I really do feel like it defines a lot of who I am and what I look for in a company culture. I, as I like to say to my friends had the most miserable internship at Facebook, I had a manager who very clearly gave me a project that even higher ups for the data engineering intern team thought was just a stupid project. It wasn't a data engineering project where I was using the Python and SQL that I had learned during my undergraduate studies to build a bigger platform. It was a product in PHP that I clearly just did not know how to do. And the only reason essentially that he gave me the project was just because he didn't want to do it himself. He phrased it to me as working on a part of a stack that was not touched by many data engineers. But I later learned that was just code for I don't want to do this project. Let's just give it to the intern and risk his career on it. After all, if he fails, doesn't matter to him.
And I felt just this immense pressure where my manager would say one thing about, you know, Ajay, we'll take a look at this project. We'll talk about it after lunch. And then I would follow his directions. And then he would come back to me, accusing me of not being independent enough as a developer. And only because I had asked for him for his help, like I said, I would, he was a manager who initially was shocked that Facebook would penalize interns for asking questions during the development process, or about their projects, or about what Facebook does as a company. Yet, I was penalized during my midterm process for asking too many questions as an intern, and for not understanding something immediately.
And as a person with minor ADHD, you know, asking questions is just one of the ways that I completely understand the codebase around me, and the problems that I'm working on, it helps me better focus away from the distractions around me in my mind and in my life, and to solve the problem at hand in order to build a better community. In fact, one of the moments that I think absolutely made me the most mad when I was an intern at Facebook was I had a teammate, who was also on my team, also a data engineer. And he was explaining a very tough technological aspect of the code base to me. And the way that I learned the best is by writing notes down, my roommate will often chide me, and get a little annoyed at me for having tons and tons of just notepads and papers strewn all over my desk in the living room for everyone to see. But that's how I learn, I write down notes, I write down everything. So I can reference it and look back at it later on, even if it's a tiny minor detail, so I can understand what I'm working on. And I remember I took out my notebook, and the software engineer was like a J, put it away, focus on what I'm telling you. And at that moment, I didn't know what to say I was just shocked, there was no way that I could learn based on just visual and auditory senses that I was getting in. And, as a result, I couldn't understand what he was telling me. In a lot of ways, it felt kind of ableist to me, working at a company where it was very clear that as an intern, I didn't matter where I wasn't supported by my team, I felt solo I felt alone. And, you know, being a person who has ADHD, and as a result, occasional anxiety from that ADHD,
I felt that I couldn't solve the problems at hand, because in terms of those disabilities, my team could not support me, and oftentimes just refused to support me, it wasn't that they couldn't support me, they had the ability to do so. But rather, they would have rather seen me drown because of my ADHD, and because of the way that I learned, then, quite frankly, to just help me understand the problem at hand.
And at that moment, when I didn't get the return offer from Facebook, even though I really wanted it not because I wanted to go back to Facebook, but because I was so miserable and frustrated with how my Facebook internship had gone with a manager who cared more about his own ego, in his own theory of data engineering than his own intern with a manager who didn't even know that Facebook was a controversial company because he lived in his own bubble for so long. And with teammates who didn't care about my own ADHD, and about my own ways of learning that I just wanted to take the return offer, and just absolutely say no. And so I was miserable. At the end of that summer, I felt like that my own skill set my own beliefs of what I could do as an engineer were shattered. I felt that when I didn't get my return offer at Facebook, when my manager said, Oh, Ajay, you know, don't think that you're a bad engineer, you obviously can go ahead and and you have a technical skill set, and you can obviously contribute somewhere else. I felt that I was being mocked. I felt that he wasn't taking responsibility for some of the actions that he had done as a manager. And yes, you know, there were things that I could have done better as an engineer. After all, I was only 21 years old, I was between my junior and senior years in college.
But at that moment, I realized that I didn't want to be at a company like Facebook, because Facebook, not just in within that team, but also within the company has this ego where they think that they can do no wrong, where they think that there's no criticism whatsoever that is valid of them. And it's something that we've continued to see time and time again with continuous spread of political and now COVID-19 misinformation on their social media platform.
And so after that summer, I felt kind of depressed. I came back to the university where I was in Washington, DC and then in California, and felt completely unfamiliar to me. I knew that my end goal just a few months away was going to work on a political campaign to utilize my technical skill sets for
Social Good, because I knew damn well after those three months at Facebook that, quite frankly, Facebook wasn't doing anything in terms of the social good realm. Facebook obviously is a net negative on our society. I'm not saying that Facebook only does negative things. In fact, that's how I met my roommate in Austin, Texas, through a Facebook group. That's how I built up a lot of my social groups and Austin through Facebook Messenger groups, how I've been able to meet people and keep interest in aviation, have been through Facebook groups. And there are things that Facebook does positively contribute to my life. But overall, I do think that Facebook is a net negative on society. And many people don't see that.
And a lot of software engineers don't see that. Especially at the University of Illinois, I had a lot of friends who were turning down.
Interview offers to just work at Amazon, even though that the summer before they had an absolutely miserable experience. It was only because of not just Amazon looking good on their resume. But also because they want it to look good to other software engineers. They want people to think better of them just because they worked at Amazon.
And at that point, I realized that I truly didn't fit in at a pure technical side of things. I also didn't fully fit in on the purely political side of things either I knew that going to work at the Sophos down the hill after I graduated college wouldn't be the best way to utilize my skill set. After all, I double majored I did computer science, and statistics was my first major. And then political science as my second major, I knew that there had to exist some form of these, this field, where I could combine my passion for Political Science and Government and improving society with my technical skill set. And that's how I found coding it forward. And a lot of ways I found Konya forward when I was very lost in my life, during my senior year when I came back, and I wasn't sure if I would be accepted at my own university. And I didn't feel accepted by my own peers for a very long time at my university, because of that mission, change in my life with me rebelling against my friends who were only going to Amazon because for the clout, you know, for my own self, who wasn't sure if he was a good enough engineer.
And I had friends who were even jealous of me that I got to Facebook in the first place. I had friends who were talking trash about me just because of my own technical skill set. And I realized at that point that I didn't want to be in this completely toxic realm of things. And that's how I found coding it forward. I remember I was in India on vacation, and I was looking at research opportunities. And I realized that coding it forward opened up a summer internship. And I applied, because I felt that given my background in social justice in political science and computer science, this was the perfect place for me.
And I'm so lucky that I got to spend three months working at the Department of Health and Human Services during the COVID 19 pandemic, as a, as a coding it forward data sciences fellow that summer, even though it was remote, and even though I didn't meet a vast majority of my friends through coding it forward, until the summer after when we did our little vacation in Chicago for the weekend. It allowed me to build this civic technology community that I really needed. That didn't exist at the University of Illinois and I have other fellows who are in my cohort who went to the University of Illinois who have felt the similar aloofness because, yes, the university is amazing. And yes, it has opened doors for me to go to Facebook and JP Morgan, and working on the Hill for Congressman Raja krishnamoorthi. But if you want to go into a mixture of those fields, you're alone, because everyone in the computer science department is trying to angle for a Fan Company to just slightly notice them, rather than thinking about the social impact that they can do with the skill set that they have on their hands. And so being a part of a community of like minded individuals who thought the exact same way that I did, you know, for me, as a person who had felt lost in my career, was not sure what I wanted to do for several months at a time, who felt that he didn't have a friend group, who supported him in his career goals, instead of, you know, making fun of me and mocking me for a getting an internship at Facebook when they didn't, and also for, you know, wanting to make the world a better place and working on a political campaign and 2020 instead of going with the flow and going to Amazon or Facebook. It was so relieving. And in a lot of ways it helped me reassure that what I was doing with my career was the right thing.
And I'm to this day, so thankful for coding it forward. And for the community that I have, I mean, Eric, one of my closest friends Jesse's saying he was a coding it forward fellow and now we live 10 minutes away from each other in Austin, and it's so cool to see our friendship blossom from a virtual one to a civic tech one to
You know, being one of my closest friends in a city that I just moved to a few months before. And ironically, that moment for me, moving to Austin, Texas was because of utilizing technology for social good.
After my time, at coding afford at the Department of Health and Human Services, I got a job opportunity with the Texas Democratic Party. It was my dream job, the job where I was utilizing my technical skill sets on a political campaign for the entire state Democratic Party of Texas, to help defeat Donald Trump and help bring the White House back to Democrats. It's what I wanted to do, ever since the day after the 2016 presidential election. And that Job was remote. I was working from a little bit in Chicago, Illinois, and a little bit in Champaign, Illinois, where I went to school, I was working from there.
And during that time, I was thinking about what I wanted life to be post COVID. And at that time, I had already decided that I no longer wanted to work in Chicago, Illinois, I had lived in Illinois, my entire life. I was born in Chicago, raised in the suburbs, went to the University of Illinois, I had spent 23 and a half years of my life in Illinois, I knew that I wanted something different. And I realized via working at the Texas Democratic Party and being around all of these wonderful people.
I found that Austin was a really cool city. It wasn't like San Francisco, when I spent this entire summer in Silicon Valley around so many tech bros why felt like there was this bubble, that people didn't think about the societal impacts that their technologies had on our communities. It also didn't feel like Washington, DC, where it was just political bros. Obsessed with who they saw on the Hill that day, which I admit, it is really cool. When you got to see someone you've seen on the news, just walk a few feet away from you. But I wanted to be in a city where I felt that I could again, blend my tech career with, you know, my political interests. And so I chose Austin, Texas. And that is how I ended up there.
I ended up in Austin, Texas in August 2021, several months after I left the Texas Democratic Party. But in order to do that I needed a job that was either permanently remote, or that was based in Austin, Texas. And so during the time period between January and April of 2021, when Evan Debreu. And I first started up our podcast,
I was on an intense job search as with Evan. And that's how we both ended up getting our jobs today. When I was on this job search, I eventually got narrowed down to three companies, two of which were political tech companies. And the third of which is this startup called column. Now I remember interviewing at the political tech companies being like I really wanted these jobs. After all, I had angled for so long to be on a political campaign that it obviously made sense that I should continue being in political tech.
But there was just something about the interviews that I was having with column, you know, first with my, our CTO, Leo Hentscher, who I think is just an amazing person. And I mean seriously like an idol and a role model to me.
And realizing that his mindset, in terms of just team building in terms of company culture, in terms of civic technology were the exact same.
And then having my software engineering interview with another good friend of mine Teresa Tseng, I realized that even though I wanted to work in political tech, it would be so hard to say no to a company like Column. And looking at the job posting, which I ironically found on this website called tech jobs for social good.com, I knew that I didn't want to be a software engineer, I throw lights on data for several years, I should have continued being a data engineer.
I knew that I didn't want to work at a startup. I had a really weird startup experience my freshman year with a guy who wasn't really a CEO, but he really just wanted to be a Tiktok influencer before Tiktok influencers were a thing and just wanted a really cool hype drinking, startup, more than a startup that actually helped people. And I also wasn't sure about leaving political tech. And so in a lot of ways column didn't check many of the checkboxes that I was initially looking for in a company. It checked to the big one, though, to utilize technology for social good. And as I went through the interview process with column I realized that column to me was the exact antithesis of my experience at Facebook. My experience at Facebook gave me a lot of anxiety about whether or not I was doing enough as a software engineer whether I was asking the right questions, whether or not I was smart enough for the job, or whether or not like, my own teammates would not help support me throughout my growth as a software engineer. And I realized that Column was the exact place that I needed. Because even just looking at the cultural things, it was the antithesis of Facebook, it was the antithesis of Facebook, every single bit of experience. But also, Column is working on an amazing product that helps put the power back in local journalism that helps keep money in local newspapers, pockets, we're developing software, to not just improve the public notice process for the newspapers, but to also make public information more public, we're helping to improve government transparency. And to me, all of those things felt like it was the perfect job. And so I took my offer at Column, back in March of 2021. And I haven't looked back ever since. And, in a lot of ways, my experience, a column has just been absolutely wonderful. I've talked a little bit about it on the podcast, but I have been able to meet some of the most magnificent, wonderful, well rounded people that quite frankly, you don't get to meet at a top five Computer Science University. I mean, I'll just give you an example. Right now. We have a product manager at column who's just a really wonderful person. But she didn't take a technological route to get to being a product manager, she was an English major in college, and then realized that she loves being a product manager. And that's how she became a product manager at our small little startup back when we were just a few people. We have another software engineer who spent several years teaching in South Korea. And then realized that he wanted a career shift and became a software engineer.
It's just to me that we have so many well rounded people that I realized that these were the people that I wanted to be around, these are the people that I would call my friends. And I'm so thankful for the opportunity that I've had to work a column, it's been absolutely wonderful. And it's allowed me to not only learn a lot about myself, in terms of who I want to surround myself in life, the type of jobs that I want to have the type of company that I want to be at the values that I have instilled both in my work culture, but in my after work culture as well. But it's also allowed me to significantly pursue other interests.
You know, I view myself as a person, as multiple halves, or left brain and right brain. Like I said earlier, a lot of the people during my collegiate experience at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, lived, breathe, ate, drink slept, computer science. That was it, I remember having a conversation with one of my friends.
I remember him saying something along the lines of he only wanted to date people who were in computer science, because he couldn't talk about anything else. And if he only talked about computer science, as someone who wasn't in computer science, they just wouldn't get it. And that would bore him. And it just felt really one dimensional to me to just kind of think along those lines of just your entire life being coding and computer science.
And being able to see people's interests that column in terms of food, in terms of travel, in terms of writing in terms of filmmaking, it just allowed me to kind of convey and accept this mindset in my life of we are very distinct people. There are a lot of very unique things about us. And we aren't just what are our skill sets are. I mean, for example, take me I mean, what makes me unique as an individual, I grew up in a household where my father was Indian and my mother was Italian, you know, it was half Indian and half Italian, I take so much pride in being a part of both cultures, because they're both wonderful cultures with wonderful values where you, you know, family is extremely important. And like I said, like one of the things that I've loved about traveling over the past month was being able to reconnect with family and friends that I have not seen in several years. It's been absolutely wonderful. And for me, it was culturally important to do that.
You know, I studied at the University of Illinois, my initial major was statistics and computer science. And then I added on a political science major.
But I've also had a lot of other interests, obviously outside of computer science and politics. I mean, for example, I love to play tennis. I love to cook from time to time you all will see me posts on my my little Instagram, which I fit a lot more during the pandemic on my Ajay cooks account about some of the things that I would be cooking or some of the things that I would be eating. And
even for me like lately, like one of the big things that I've been working on and not completely official yet because this article is yet to come out, but I recently signed a freelance travel writing contract with one of the top travel websites out there mainly about
I'm utilizing points in miles to save money on travel. Because that is something that I'm extremely passionate about. And working in a company like column has allowed me to pursue that passion where, you know, I can stay passionate about politics and the world around me, where I can utilize my computer science skill set on government facing problems on public notice and local journalism facing problems, but also be able to explore side interest of travel. And not on top of that, obviously, not just travel, but being able to make this podcast for you all, for us to be an outlet about all the wonderful opportunities that exist in civic technology.
I, in a lot of ways, would not have the life that I have had. Without that skill set that was not just skill set that mindset that was instilled in me at a young age, about utilizing what you have utilizing that, at times that privilege that you have to make a level playing field for other people in your community.
You know, if I ended up just following the normal route, that all the fish are swimming in the current at my university, I probably would be a miserable software data engineer at Facebook, or at Amazon.
But instead, I've been able to just kind of live this wonderful life of being able to work on problems that impact society, whether it has been working at the Department of Health and Human Services on COVID-19 data in the Medicare medicaid system and generating datasets that were used on the President's COVID task force.
Whether or not it was working for the Texas Democratic Party, automating data sheets for them in terms of finance level, and being able to kind of just put whatever effort and skill set that I had into something that was bigger than myself, I mean, the state of our own country, and being able to work at column as a software engineer, where I've grown significantly.
As a coder, I mean, going from data to software, where I've been able to grow significantly as a person, being able to surround myself with well rounded people and getting rid of this fear that I'm allowed to explore my own interests that aren't just in computer science.
And also just being surrounded by so many well rounded people who, you know, I love to call my friends because they're absolutely so dear and so wonderful.
And, you know, being able to move to Austin, I never would have thought about moving to Austin, Texas. If I wasn't, you know, a normal tech job, it was San Francisco or bust for me until the end of my junior year.
I'm really, really thankful for all the opportunities that working in civic tech has given me. I mean, it's given me a voice.
It's a voice that I didn't have during my first three years of college, first three and a half years of college really until the moment I started Coding It Forward during the summer of 2020.
To be supported by this just wonderful community is something that is truly dear to me.
Whether it has been my career choices, whether it has been this podcast, which again, I am so thankful for you all, y'all have to tune into our podcasts and hear what our wonderful guests have to talk about in their careers in what drives them and what gets them out of bed in the morning to major life decisions.
It's something that I see every single day of my life, this wonderful civic technology community.
You know, whether it has been dealing with ADHD even or even just general anxiety from time to time has been the most loving community that I think I've ever been a part of, in a lot of ways, y'all are family to me. And I got a big family being from an Indian and Italian culture. Family is important. You know, Vin Diesel said it best you know, you don't mess with family. You know, you see it in the sopranos in The Godfather a lot, even though those are mobster movies, but family is so important.
And to be honest, without my family, both my immediate family, I mean, my parents, I absolutely love them so much. And I mean, I sincerely would not have become the man that I am today without my own parents. I mean, they've supported me for every single little thing in terms of my own career. And not everyone has that opportunity. And I mean, I really am thankful to my mother and my father and I loved them so much. And this community as well.
You know, it's absolutely wonderful. And that's kind of about it on my end. That's my story.
That's how I ended up getting the civic technology mindset and me, have this impact instilled. mindset from a young age, utilizing volunteering, to going to college and realizing there was something more to my own life than just working at Facebook, Amazon, Google, or some flashy startup.
And getting to where I am today from, you know, working the good fight at the Texas Democratic Party, working with the Department of Health and Human Services during COVID-19 pandemic, to working today at column with a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful crew of people and seeing that company and myself grow over the past year. That's my story. And thank you so much for listening this evening.
Ajay Jain: My Career Story and A Love Letter to Civic Tech