Madalyn Parker

About Me

Work Experience

1. Senior Software Engineer

   11/2020 – Present

   Microsoft - Accessibility Insights · Ann Arbor, MI (Remote)

   • Enables developers, both inside and outside of Microsoft, to create accessible applications:
     • Contributes to the vision, design, implementation, and maintenance of Accessibility Insights products
     • Stewards and engages the Accessibility Insights Open Source community
   • Web accessibility Subject Matter Expert
   • Fosters an environment of psychological safety through normalizing mental illness, asking for help, and prioritizing the most vulnerable

2. Staff Software Engineer, Accessibility

   09/2019 – Present

   Gatsby · Ann Arbor, MI (Remote)

   • Developed and delivered a comprehensive course on the principles of web accessibility and how to conduct accessibility audits to the entire engineering organization, which involved:
     • building a training grounds application using idiomatic Gatsby technologies (themes, MDX, Gatsby Cloud)
     • writing content that teaches the principles of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and raises awareness of common workflows and assistive technologies that disabled people use to interact with the web
     • using plain language, metaphors, images, and interactive activities to reach a variety of learning styles
     • ensuring that all content is well documented and can easily be referred back to asynchronously
   • Collaborated across teams and pulled knowledge from other companies and projects to establish company-wide standards for accessibility at each stage of the development cycle, from prototype to deployment
   • Implements components that improve screen reader user experience for Client Side Route changes, which are ubiquitous in modern frontend frameworks, making Gatsby one of the only frameworks that is accessible in this way
   • Consults with other teams across the company on best practices and recommended patterns when implementing specific features and components
   • Writes technical blog posts and GitHub Issues to communicate Gatsby’s commitment to accessibility, explain the technical specifics and methods of my work, and enable other organizations to learn from it
   • Organizes and leads weekly internal Accessibility Office Hours, which includes:
     • Creating a company-wide forum to ask, talk, and learn about accessibility, disability, and relevant current events
     • Compiling a digest that builds on those conversations and gets sent to every Gatsby employee, enabling the entire company to learn about these subjects whether or not they can attend the meetings

3. Senior Software Engineer

   04/2018 – 09/2019

   HashiCorp · Ann Arbor, MI (Remote)

   • Learned Ember.js rapidly and pragmatically to minimize onboarding time and contribute to the team quickly.
   • Developed highly complex features to contribute to both user and developer experiences, distilling high level requests to full specs and architecture decisions laid out in RFCs and then executing through quality frontend code, most notably:
     • Built Vault’s UI Wizard, which takes advantage of the XState node module to onboard new users to Vault’s highly technical UI
     • Created Vault’s Dynamic UI, which consumes Vault’s API (which adheres to the OpenAPI spec) to generate UI views on the fly, minimizing developer time spent on adding each new integration to Vault’s frontend
   • Prioritized elegance, accessibility, and UX in all projects to deliver features that serve the open source community and our current/future users
   • Collaborated closely with other stakeholders to ensure that we are building the right thing the right way
   • Contributed to our internal culture by writing our communication/collaboration interview, sitting on both the Employee Feedback Committee and Diversity and Inclusion taskforce, and mentoring new engineers

4. Frontend Developer

   01/2014 – 04/2018

   Olark · Ann Arbor, MI (Remote)

   • Touched every frontend repository (Node.js, CoffeeScript, ES6, React, Redux) within Olark with large contributions to the web operator console (built with Backbone.js), several iterations of our billing application, moving from Backbone to React/Redux, and our chat box itself
   • Advocated strongly for web accessibility and leveraged axe-core to improve the screen reader workflow of the chat box
   • Built a React/Redux application for our Integrations Portal from the ground up, including hundreds of tests, making architecture decisions, and connecting to REST API endpoints
   • Investigated and debugged tricky, customer-reported, issues as part of triage rotation
   • Actively contributed to internal culture, advocating for diversity and inclusion and normalizing mental illness
   • Participated in All Hands Support on frontline customer support at least twice a month
   • Managed several projects and coordinated with stakeholders (both inside and outside the company) to deliver quality software

Education

1. Bachelor of Science, Computer Science, Minor in Chinese

   09/2009 – 12/2013

   Michigan State University · East Lansing, MI

Speaking