City Bureau

Between Dec 2023 and Aug 2024, I worked as a software engineer for City Bureau, a non-profit journalism lab based in Chicago, where I maintained and monitored a system of more than 400 web scrapers. These scrapers were tasked with collecting data from local government websites across the U.S. to help inform residents and local journalists about upcoming public meetings.

My key accomplishments include:

• Building more than 20 scrapers and reviewing more than a dozen builds by contract developers.

• Fixing and rebuilding more than 50 scrapers and merging more than 50 PRs related to bug fixes, performance enhancements, and core upgrades.

• Creating internal tools for monitoring scraper outages and devising new internal processes for reporting scraper outages.

• Researching and experimenting with LLM-based scraping solutions to improve the scraping system's long-term viability.

• Improving internal documentation on scraping systems to assist our technical teams and contractors.