Hi there, my name is Kara Rizzardi!
I'm a software engineer based in the SF Bay Area.
A bit about me
I'm a graduate from UC Berkeley (go bears!) who studied Electrical Engineering & Computer Science. I enjoy learning about + using new technologies and have an interest in fullstack development. I'm extra passionate about frontend development and creating good UI/UX experiences along with building scalable, secure, and high-performance backend systems.
Most of my free time is spent doing hot yoga (vinyasa, not bikram), snowboarding, and making music. I played the clarinet for 6 years, but nowadays I like to focus on guitar & piano. I have a youtube channel where I like to post covers and original compositions for fun.
My experience
- Developing payment processing solutions utilizing Java EE technologies (Java, application servers, servlet containers, JMS, JPA, Spring MVC, Hibernate)
Backend Developer
- Developed an IT service chatbot using conversational AI and natural language understanding
- Implemented functionality for users to conversationally submit IT tickets, improving the user experience for thousands of end-users and supporting 14k+ tickets per month (custom process built using JavaScript)
- Acted as a Technical Architect & functional lead, providing direction to development team & assisting product owner in planning work to strategize & build out the product vision
- Worked with product management & cross functional teams to define architectural visions that align business and IT strategies with software implementations
ServiceNow Developer
- Berkeleytime helps over 40,000 UC Berkeley students plan for course enrollment & check grade distributions
- Redesigned berkeleytime.com homepage (viewed by 20k+ users per month) using React.js, CSS, and HTML
Frontend Developer
- Worked closely with stakeholders and project owner to design UI/UX using Figma
- Built out responsive frontend using React and Material UI
- Reduced Webpack bundle size by 48%
- Optimized Rest API resulting in a 54% speed increase
- Designed authentication & authorization system flow
- Setup SSO authentication using Microsoft Azure
- Developed automation tooling to improve deployment processes
- Wrote and maintained unit tests
- Wrote Chef Inspec scripts to audit & test infrastructure
- Exposure to computer networking, cloud platforms, and virtualization technologies
Fullstack developer on Agile software development team (order management system)
Backend developer on Agile software development team (automated server provisioning)
- Built website to support the community-led "Keep Our Library Open" campaign to fight against the closure of our local library
- Designed UI using Figma
- Advocated for the importance of women in technology
Frontend developer on a team with 12 other women
Resume
Projects
Stuff I find cool
- GNU is a recursive acronym for "GNU's Not Unix!"
- something everyone should see: www.nohello.net
- the relationship between space and time: special relativity
a haikyu:
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