Bethany M. Soule
Master of SCIENCE
Education
M.S. Computer Science, May 2009
Columbia University, New York NY — 3.0 GPA
B.A. Russian, May 2004
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor MI
Minor in Painting — 3.6 GPA
Skills
Programming
A programmer’s programmer who codes for fun and profit. I’m as proud of my own projects as the time I’ve spent working on others’ projects.
Web Design
A background in the visual arts makes for solid aesthetics and strong opinions on design and user experience.
Personal projects
Beeminder.com
- Automatically graph progress towards a goal such as weight loss, number of pushups, or hours worked. Bugs you regularly for a number and updates your graph.
- PHP, CSS, Perl.
Tagtime
- Tracks how you spend your time by randomly sampling from you over the course of the day.
- Java, Android SDK, SQLite.
Numbered IMs (NIMS)
- An Adium plugin that implements a simple protocol to verify message receipt.
- Objective C.
Taskbot
- An instant message bot that acts as a group task manager.
- Java, jYMSG API.
Technical
- Javascript, PHP
- XHTML, CSS
- MySQL, WordPress
- Ruby (on Rails)
- Scheme
- Perl, Python
- Java, C++, C
- OS X/Unix/Linux
- Subversion, Git, Bzr
Experience
Beeminder.com
Co-founder and CTO
Nov 2010 – Present
Bethany is the resident Rails guru and does everything from the mongodb backend to the jquery frontend. She deploys daily.
FireDogLake.com
WordPress developer, freelance
April 2010 – Nov 2010
Single handedly launched my.firedoglake.com from implementing the theme, to writing custom wordpress plugins, customization of the BuddyPress plugin, large scale migration of user accounts and existing data for ~30K users into the new site, and addressing database scaling issues.
Soar Technology, Ann Arbor MI
Student Intern
May – August 2006
Learned the Soar programming language and contributed code to a large existing code-base for a military simulation project.
Literacy*AmeriCorps, Seattle WA
Technology educator
2004 – 2005
Managed the computer literacy program (Wired For Learning) at the Seattle Public Library, including: developing curriculum and course materials; teaching basic computer skills classes to low literacy level and non-native English speaking adults; and the management and training of approximately 25 volunteers.
About Bee
I think of biking a century as a fun Saturday activity and tied the age-group record of 178 miles in 12 hours at Ohio’s Calvin’s Challenge bicycle race in 2006. I’ve also been known to climb stairs competitively and hold a PR of 15:38s at Chicago’s annual Hustle Up the Hancock — that’s 104.4 stairs per minute, baby!
I’m also a little quantification obsessed. Check out this talk I gave at the NYC Quantified Self meetup in August.