Randy E Brown
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CZI EIR @ /dev/color

I’m excited to announce that I’ll be working as the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Engineer in Residence at /dev/color this fall through the end of the year.

/dev/color is a non-profit building a network of black software engineers helping each other become industry leaders. I was originally connected to their Founder and CEO, Makinde Adeagbo, through Y-Combinator co-founder Jessica Livingston back when they were participating in the Y-Combinator Winter 2016 batch.

Since attending their first conference later that year, and becoming an A* member in 2017, I’ve been incredibly impressed by the community and sense of empowerment that Makinde and team have built.

This is possible because the /dev/color team sees itself, and functions as, a true tech startup. Every day they are constantly collecting feedback and iterating on the program to maximize the power of the network for its members.

Behind the surface, much of the organization is run through an internal portal built by members. This portal serves as both a way to facilitate interactions between members and a way to collect immediate feedback on ways to improve.

Through the sponsorship of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative I’ll have a few months to help accelerate contributions to this portal and hopefully set the stage for a lot more improvements to come. One day we want to open source our work to serve as an example to the broader community of people and organizations working to build a more diverse and inclusive workforce.

While working on these initiatives this fall I’ll be traveling between New York City and San Francisco. If you’re interested in catching up about what we’re working on, please shoot me a note!