Working with Me

Intro

• Name pronunciation: gr-EGG WALL-ker
• Pronouns: he/him
• Chapter: 18F Engineering
• Started: January, 2016
• Location: Minneapolis, MN
• Working hours: 8:00 am CT to 5:30 pm CT

Skills

• backend coding (mostly Node.js these days, but I can get around in Python, and I would welcome an excuse to play with Swift or C# again)
• "back of the frontend" coding (the Javascript parts of the frontend; I can do HTML, but CSS for anything complex is a struggle)
• communicating without jargon

Work style preferences

• I'm usually at work by 9am central time, but I'd prefer not to take meetings before 10am. If we need an earlier meeting, just let me know and we can make it work; just please show me some grace because I'm not an early person.
• I eat lunch. If you need to schedule through my lunch block, please try to let me know beforehand, and also don't be surprised if I eat during our meeting.
• I'm generally pretty flexible, otherwise, and I don't mind changing things up if it turns out something isn't working for someone.

Count on me to...

• Bring some humor and silliness to work. I believe that we can do our best work in places where we can have fun.
• See the ways our seemingly small work can blossom into huge impacts. We are only with our partners for a fairly short time and sometimes when we leave, it can feel like we didn't do anything. But government is a very long game, and the small things we do today will ripple for years to come.
• Celebrate our entire team. We do great work here at 18F and we should acknowledge and celebrate our accomplishments.

Hobbies and interests

• playing with my dog
• video games, sometimes
• running
• drawing
• pottery

Projects I've worked on

(most recent first)

• National Weather Service public API

  This one is brand new. We're still discovering what we're gonna do!

• National Weather Service weather.gov

  We worked with the National Weather Service to entirely rebuild weather.gov (not yet launched). The site is built on Drupal for its content management needs, templated through Twig, and pulls data from the NWS public API through a Node.js app we call the "interop layer" that puts all the data into the format our Twig templates expect. This is one of the best projects I've worked on at 18F, and it's still ongoing!

• 18F Delivery Assurance

  Recurring. As of February 2023, this is where 18F staff go when they're between projects. It's a team that works on various 18F products that are otherwise difficult to maintain due to our funding structure.

• Team Talent support for TTSJobs site

  The TTSJobs site is how our Talent Team advertises job openings to the world. It's been difficult for the Talent Team members to add new jobs because the pages are littered with conditional logic, in the Liquid template language, embedded in Markdown, relying heavily on frontmatter. The gist of my work was to make it easier for Talent to create and update job postings. This included a major overhaul to the base template they start with, moving logic into Liquid includes, and reducing reliance on frontmatter.

• Co-working Adventures Team

  A small internal-to-18F team worked on a model of sustainable long-term product maintance, optimizing for rapidly onboarding and offboarding other 18F staff when they are briefly between projects. We have several internal products (such as the UX Guide) that are tough to maintain with staff on billable projects all the time, and our work was to find ways to make it easier for staff to drop in and out of maintaining these kinds of products.

• OCC de-risking workshops

  Working with the Office of Child Care (OCC) in the Administration of Children and Families (ACF), we presented a virtual version of our tech procurement de-risking workshop to several OCC grantees (states, territories, and tribal authorities). We recorded the content and made it available online. With the help and input of OCC, we identified a few grantees for a deeper one-on-one consultation to dive into their specific needs and try to give them useful suggestions or advice. Along with helping OCC and its grantees, we also took this time to pull de-risking workshop content together and package it into a more readily reusable format.

• ACF OPRE

  Joined in progress. We worked with the Administration of Children and Family's (ACF) Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE). OPRE is responsible for a significant amount of research and evaluation grants, and they have a legacy system that helps them track information about those various ongoing projects. However, the legacy system no longer meets their needs and OPRE staff are forced to manually collect and correlate a significant amount of information. We originally intended to help OPRE by starting to build a new product and eventually hand it off to a vendor team. However, due to internal TTS constraints, the engagement was truncated and we ultimately focused on helping OPRE write a solicitation and select a vendor to build the entire product.

• State of Washington IE&E modernization

  Joined in progress. The state of Washington is currently in the process of rethinking their public benefits system, including potentially integrating various programs. One potential starting point is integrating eligibility and enrollment for all the programs into a single application. We joined the state to help work through building out the first parts of a new digital system in a user-centered, iterative way. Unfortunately, due to internal TTS issues, we were not able to continue this engagement and had to end it before we felt we had made much progress. Our partners at Washington were great and eager to eager to adopt new practices, but we just didn't have enough time (and they didn't either, honestly) to establish those.

• CMS contract terminiation path analysis

  We worked with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to do some research into how and why state Medicaid IT contracts were terminated to try to figure out ways to improve outcomes. This was a research-intensive project that involved a bunch of interviews, and we learned a bunch about the incentives at play. In coordination with our partners at CMS, we wrote a report that outlined our findings and offered some proposals for how to improve the odds of contracts producing value. Our recommendations touched on the roles of CMS, the states, and the IT vendors, and were well-received by everyone involved, including the vendor community.

• NASA SBIR

  Another project I joined in progress. 18F was originally supposed to help NASA build an acquisition to replace the vendor on their SBIR system, which is the tool small business use to apply for research contracts (essentially). Later, NASA decided to keep the same vendor, so we transitioned to working with NASA to map out a path to product ownership, iterative development, and moving the existing SBIR system into NASA-owned infrastructure.

• CMS CARTS

  The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) was building a new web application for states to report on program access, service quality, and individuals' experiences with CHIP services. 18F was co-developing the app with a vendor team. I joined the project in-progress. While everyone on the team - CMS, 18F, and the vendor - was committed to the work and trying their best, for various reasons, the project was not successful. In this project, we had to navigate some difficult interpersonal issues and terminate our engagement early.

• USFS firewoord permitting

  The US Forest Service (USFS) was building a web application to allow members of the public to buy permits to harvest firewood from national forests. 18F's role was product coaching and helping to provide technical oversite and quality assurance. I joined the project in-progress. Unfortunately, our USFS teammates weren't in a good position to properly own and manage the product at the time, largely due to being shorthanded and very busy with other tasks, so the project ended early.

• 10x phase ones

  Various. I don't think they were anything special; pretty typical phase ones.

• CMS APD research and eAPD

  Following our work with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) on state Medicaid systems, we asked if we could help CMS research their Advance Planning Document (APD) process, because we had come to suspect it was an impediment to states adopting the best practices CMS was asking of them. Our research led CMS to choose to build a web tool for building APDs, called eAPD. We worked with CMS product leads on building the tool while also helping them practice product management and ownership for about 3 years. We rolled off shortly after bringing on a vendor team. The product is planned to go live in 2021, and our product friends at CMS are still driving the eAPD ship. This is probably my favorite project from my time at 18F so far.

• National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA)

  It wasn't prestigious or secret work. We were mostly helping them figure out how to word procurement documents so they would attract the right vendors and then how to evaluate the vendor responses they got so they could pick a team that would be most likely to deliver successfully.

• Department of Labor 14(c)

  We worked with the Department of Labor to try to create a more streamlined application for businesses to get 14(c) certificates. This was an acquisition using 18F's now-deprecated Agile BPA, and my role was mostly post-award management stuff related to technical quality review.

• State Medicaid acquisition consulting

  Starting in 2016, we first worked with states through the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to help figure out paths towards modernizing their MMIS systems, and then later we worked directly with the states. We realized that MMIS systems were too complex to start with, so we transitioned more to working with eligibility and enrollment (E&E) systems. These projects involved migrating data and workflows from mainframes, and our focus was on working with our state partners to outline a technical approach and build an acquisition plan for getting good vendors in to help the state implement the plan. We also worked on getting our state partners ready to work in a user-centered, iterative way and to take ownership of the products they were building.

• Unaccompanied Children

  Worked with the Office of Refugee Resettlement in the Administration of Childrens and Families (in HHS) to evaluate the IT systems they used to keep track of children who crossed the border without an accompanying adult. These children were often temporarily held in government or contracted facilities until a family member in the United States could be found to take them in. The software they were working with caused them significant problems, and we proposed several possible paths forward. The project ended before making a choice or implementing a solution.

Prior to 18F

Before 18F, I worked as a civilian in the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) at the Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC). (I agree, it ought to be "Engineering" but nobody asked me.) USACE has a joint military and civil service mission. The civil service mission is broad, including things such as environmental protection, navigable waterways, managing all public dams, and disaster response and relief. The civil mission is mostly staffed by civilian personnel. The military mission is to serve all the engineering needs of the US Army, and is mostly staffed by military personnel.

• Engineered Resilient Systems

  Worked with military services to build tools to help them more thoroughly consider design candidates for new vehicle systems that could meet a wide set of mission requirements over a long period of time. These vehicle designs were deemed "resilient" because they would reduce lifetime operational costs. In essence, we built tools to analyze very large, multidimensional model data to identify clusters of design candidates that satisfied miission constraints so designers and decisionmakers could narrow their focus more quickly. For this work, I was awarded an Army civilian service medal.

• Deployable Force Protection

  Worked across various Army offices to support initiatives aimed at keeping military personnel safe in deployment. We helped build tools to translate all sensor inputs into a common protocol that enabled greater integration than was otherwise possible. In a second phase, we proposed and began development of a small drone platform that integrated with the sensor protocol to provide fast visual inspection of sensor-detected threats.

• Operation BlueRoof / Rapid Temporary Repair

  Operation BlueRoof and the Rapid Temporary Repair program are FEMA programs intended to help victims of large-scale natural disasters (most typically hurricanes) get back into their homes quickly. BlueRoof provides thick, high-quality blue tarps to act as a temporary roof repair. For other home damage, the Rapid Temporary Repair program could replace windows, doors, and other structural elements. While FEMA operates both programs, USACE is typically tapped to actually execute them.

  My work was focused on converting the paper application process into a more streamlined digital process. By getting people's information into the digital system directly, we removed the burden of manually entering the information from paper forms later and dramatically reduced the risk of paperwork getting lost or destroyed, a high risk in a disaster zone. Our work resulted in the average turnaround time for tarp deployment from about 20 days to about 2 days.

• Interagency Performance Evaluation Taskforce (IPET)

  USACE has a large share of responsibility for the flood protection systems along the Mississippi River, including around New Orleans. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005 resulted in widespread flooding and flood control system failure, USACE launched a systemic study to understand what went wrong and how to prevent it happening again. As part of the IPET study team, I led the development and maintenance of the data system that all geospatial data related to the study was loaded into and disseminated from. This included high-resolution LIDAR, satellite spatial photography, aerial photography, and much more. For this work, I was awarded a civilian medal by the Army Chief of Engineers.