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About Me

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Hello, I'm Terian Koscik. I am a senior software engineer at GitHub living in Chicago, IL. I work on the GitHub Education team helping students, teachers, and schools get free access to software development tools through the Student Developer Pack. Prior to that I worked on GitHub's Trust and Safety and Internal Tooling teams.

I believe that good software can make people's lives better and maybe even save the world but I am becoming less certain that humans are willing to set aside the aims of capitalism long enough to do it.

Some more info about me:
  • I'm an alumni mentor for my college's Software Development course, a required course for all computer science majors in which alumni who are professional software developers mentor students as they create web applications for organizations in their community. Professor Janet Davis wrote an article about the course's development and success. In previous semesters the student groups I mentored created a scheduling application for the local retirement community's cafeteria. This semester we're working on an anti-racism library!
  • I have taught programming and computer science concepts at Girls Inc., Saturday Academy, ChickTech, ClojureBridge, RailsBridge, and Django Girls.
  • I co-organized 6 Django Girls PDX workshops between February 2016 and July 2018, and I wrote a little bit about our 3rd workshop here.
  • I write tutorials focused on bringing fun and creativity to programming. I've presented them at conferences across the US including PyDX, RailsConf, Act-W, DjangoCon, and CodeHer. You can follow along on your own over here.
  • I made a comic book, When Anxiety Attacks, about how therapy can help with anxiety.
  • I've lived in Illinois, Iowa, Oregon, and California, which is still fewer states than my cat has lived in.
  • I studied computers at Grinnell College and comics at the Independent Publishing Resource Center.
  • I want to be fashionable like Sailor Neptune.
  • Here she is, the best cat: