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Lorraine Sawicki

Hi I’m Lorraine, working as a Technical Project Manager

I love food, gardening and architecture/interior design. I’ve mastered how to make a perfect deep-dish apple pie.
I love going to the beach, swimming, checking out new places for brunch and adding houseplants to my apartment. Over the past summer with Tame Impala as the looping soundtrack to my life, I built the framework for a garden inventory web app to help home gardeners and landscapers (especially /nolawn enthusiasts) share what’s growing in their garden. I currently live with my family (husband, teenage girl, teenage boy & Maven the Goldendoodle) in San Francisco.

I have a background in software engineering, and have worked for startups, media companies, a museum, and ran a small ISP for 10 years with my partner. I did a pivot for a few years when my kids were younger to do marketing work for an architecture firm. A co-worker at my first job told me that I would never likely have to code my own red-black binary tree from scratch with all the libraries out there. Then came the leetcode years where everyone wanted you to interview and know how to code anything from scratch. Now with AI I feel like coding and technology is exciting and welcome the next phases of what’s to come!

This year it’s learn more about AI and native plants.

My mantra is to work for organizations that:

  • I feel a strong ethical and moral alignment with on goals.
  • Challenges my abilities so that I grow in my knowledge of technology and design
  • Provides adequate pay for my skill level
  • Respects my work/life balance

I’m reliable, calm, and steady under pressure. I’m here when you need me - I just usually need a day’s notice if things are way outside my normal working window.

I’m a thinker then doer - I invest time upfront to listen and understand, which allows me to work faster as projects progress.

I’m the point person for my two kids. My partner works in-person 5 days a week at an office over an hour away, so if one of our kids gets sick or has another immediate need I have to be there for them.

I like to communicate directly and candidly, a style (I think) honed from my New Jersey roots. I lived in Seattle for over 10 years and I learned about passive aggression, which is not my favorite way of dealing with issues. We have a big country with lots of different cultural norms!

Give me direct, clear feedback - I can handle it and I value it. I find that critiques and criticism can sometimes get confusing for me to interpret over text (are you being sarcastic? playful? I need vocal inflection to tell!) so a video or voice call would be best if it’s more than a brief one-sentence “fix this”.

MacOS and Linux over Windows. Daily iterations over hackathons. Light mode over dark mode.

I’m on Pacific Standard Time and will generally be at peak availability between 9am - 2pm PST with a break for lunch. Happy to meet outside core hours (I get up early) if you give a day or two notice. Check my calendar.