“The sender of a message can never fully know his recipient’s mental code book. Two lights in a window might mean nothing or might mean ‘The British come by sea.’ Every poem is a message, different for every reader.”
– The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick
Hi, I’m Ana. I’m an organizational debugger, open source diplomat, and hobbyist programmer. I’ve spent the last decade managing technology ecosystems.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve watched what gets communicated and what gets understood, and played with ways to increase the fidelity between them. At age 11, I realized the internet was an experiment in networking human minds together, and ever since I’ve been driven to understand tech as a vehicle for creating or destroying shared meaning. The team sport of building software has become one of my favorite laboratories for studying this.
Born and raised in New York, I dropped out of college to teach myself to code. While doing so, I found my way into the early NY tech scene, which materialized into a series of roles in engineering and technical community management. My journey took me to the bleeding edge of 3D printing at Shapeways, where I helped makers push the limits of our supply chain. Next I ran support and evangelism at the hosting platform Nodejitsu, in the unnervingly early days of node.js. After Node, I spent 5 years at Stack Overflow, during which I helped defend the platform against interference prior to the 2016 US election. Most recently, I worked at Protocol Labs, helping the Filecoin team prep for open source maintainership and conducting independent research on the social impact of network effects.
Currently I coach first-time engineering leaders, advise companies building social platforms, and tinker with decentralized web technology.