webbureaucrat

Eleanor's passion

Though her degree focused on object-oriented development, Eleanor fell in love with functional programming starting with LISP and Scala. She's fascinated by the connections between functional and object-oriented best practices and is determined to continue finding ways to bring the thread-safety and referential transparency of functional programming into object-oriented, enterprise-focused languages like C#, Java, and JavaScript.

Eleanor is a proud public servant and believes that good code and good infrastructure are critical pieces of good government and that the usability and accessibility of government services are moral issues. Accordingly, she is proud of her role as a technical leader on continuous integration best practices, cloud adoption, and solid software architecture.

Eleanor's biography

Eleanor Holley started programming in high school using Visual BASIC, C++, and Java and fell in love with the craft, earning the Computer Science Award twice.

She went on to study Computer Science at DePaul University from 2013 to 2016 in a curriculum that was mostly Java and Python based and included several classes in relational database design and development in Oracle PL/SQL.

Along the way, Eleanor worked as a web development intern at the State of Indiana where she worked at the Department of Local Government Finance. she learned the web fundamentals of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript as well as ASP.NET and C#, (which was a very easy transition because C# is based on Java). She also learned a different SQL dialect: TSQL, and designed and implemented database schemas and implemented stored procedures to underly the two apps she wrote for the department for which she worked two summers. With this real-world experience to supplement her university database programming studies, she was able to pass the SQL Server Microsoft Certified Professional exam.

After graduating from college a year early, Eleanor returned to work as a web developer for the State of Indiana at the Department of Transportation for two years, using ASP.NET and C# and PL/SQL. Her skill was very quickly recognized and in an unusual move she was promoted from entry level developer to mid-level less than a year after starting, taking on more responsibilities as a technical lead in mid-sized projects, solving complex data engineering problems and learning Angular, TypeScript, and cross-platform mobile development.

Today, Eleanor is grateful to continue her work in public service as a developer in the federal government at the U. S. Railroad Retirement Board. While she continues to specialize in C#, she has picked up a number of frameworks including Drupal and ASP Classic. It is Eleanor's belief that a senior-level developer should be able to learn and be productive in a new language after about one week of study.

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