Hi, I’m Christa Hartsock.

I’m currently a backend software engineer at Meedan, a non-profit working globally to address misinformation. I live in San Francisco with my husband, Jim Fingal, and our rescue bully, Piglet.

In the recent past I’ve worked as:

• a consulting engineer at 18F, the US federal government’s technology and design consultancy
• an engineering manager, software engineer, and engineering lead at Code for America, working to improve access to criminal record relief as part of Clear My Record, and help ease the burden of getting safety net benefits through the Integrated Benefits Initiative and GetCalFresh.

Prior to working with government, I’ve worked as an engineer at the agile consultancy Pivotal Labs (RIP) and at another small product consultancy (also RIP); as a studio manager at Peter Rose and Partners, an architecture and urban design firm; as a travel guide writer in Barcelona, on a variety of cleanup crews; in many ice cream shops; and a number of other things.

Outside of work, I co-founded and helped run Logic Magazine, on which I continue on the board; and have been running a small forum I built and, more recently, a Mastodon instance for friends.

I exist a few other places:

• my (very infrequent) email newsletter
• on the fediverse across a couple of mastodon instances:
  • void.holdings (my main account)
  • friend.camp (my secondary account that mostly posts local to the friend camp instance)
• github
• linkedin
• bookwyrm (federated, non-corporate goodreads)
• email: christa (dot) hartsock (at) gmail (dot) com
• offline, mostly in san francisco, often at the Harvey Milk Photo Center

If you’d like to talk, shoot me a message via email. I’m often slow at responding, but do have the best intentions. Short, direct asks usually get a response more quickly.

Thanks for visiting; here is a gift: