Linda Peng

Code

Hi there! I enjoy code, music, video editing, and writing.

I am currently a senior software engineer at Mailchimp. Previously, I was at Twitter and at We Also Walk Dogs, the company behind ActionKit, a powerful online organizing software powering the campaigns of progressive organizations such as the ACLU, MoveOn.org, SumOfUs, 350.org, Everytown for Gun Safety, NRDC, Indivisible, Beto O'Rourke for Texas, and more.

Before that, I ran A/B tests to spread meaningful viral content and was a front-end developer at MoveOn.org.

Technologies I'm usually working with: Javascript (ES6), React, HTML/CSS, SASS, GCP, Python, Django, Go, and SQL.

I am the founder and open source maintainer for CodeBuddies, a project I started in 2014. It is 100% volunteer and driven by a bunch of amazing contributors, and also transparently non-profit thanks to the Open Collective. The project was awarded an Awesome Foundation grant in 2018. More details about its mission here.

I doubled majored in Economics and Public Policy at Duke University, but fell in love with software development my last semester, when I convinced a professor to give me independent study credit to spend waaay too many hours building a social network platform to connect college students interested in civic impact and volunteerism.

I enjoy talking to other developers, and am always learning.

Music/Video

I kickstarted and released my first album -- violin.play() -- in 2019. You can hear the rest of my music on Spotify, and get early access or behind-the-scenes on Patreon.

In my spare time I enjoy arranging and recording violin covers. :) I'll sometimes put the sheet music I arranged directly in the video so that other violinists can learn how to play the song as well.

More recently, I've been playing around with a loop pedal:

I've also been experimenting with composing using a loop pedal:

I find video editing relaxing, and have made some non-violin ones as well, like a 3-minute conference documentary and travel videos:

Writing

I am on Medium and Substack. I also have an old coding diaries blog that hasn't been updated in years. I also used to plop code tidbits onto this tumblr.

Photography

Venice, Italy during the day — Venice. November 2017.

Bridge of Sighs in Venice, Italy. — Venice. Bridge of Sighs. November 2017.

Tower Bridge in London, England. — London. Tower Bridge. November 2017.

View taken atop the Shard in London, England. — London. Taken looking down from the Shard. November 2017.

Boats in Venice, Italy. — Venice. Snap of boats. November 2017.

Speaking

I don't tend to go out of my way to speak, but here are some events I've spoken at:

Lightning talk at Women Who Code NYC (November 2014)
Co-organizer of an activism + code workshop at the Rootscamp unconference with my friend Kimberly Munoz (December 2014)
Panel organized by Thinkful about volunteerism in tech (2015)
Invited to speak at Orbital's Annual Meeting 2015 (January 2015)
Invited to HackDuke to teach two workshops (Introduction to HTML/CSS and Introduction to Django). Also gave a separate talk about tech in progressive politics. (November 2015)
Speaker at Netroots Nation (July 2016)
Asked to speak about lessons learned maintaining an open source project for Techqueria (January 2017)
Taught an all-day Introduction to Python and Django workshop as a volunteer co-instructor for Girls in Tech (March 2017)

Community

Locally, I've volunteered as a meetup director for Women Who Code East Bay and Oakland PyLadies, and stop by Write Speak Code as an open source mentor whenever I can. In the past, I've also volunteered for PyBay (the same conference I unexpectedly shot my first documentary short) and SASSConf.

Also in the past, I was an enthusiastic participant of hackathons in NYC, like Techcrunch Disrupt, Comedy Hack Day, and the New York Times Hack Day, and the Monthly Music Hackathon.