Lyza’s Laser Focus

When we first welcomed Lyza Gardner to our team, we knew her to be an especially thorough sort of web developer. Now that she’s struck out on her own, it’s a good time to document how she maintained that reputation during her time at Bocoup.

Lyza floored us with a presentation all about the burgeoning service worker technology during her interview. She earned this expertise while enhancing production systems with that feature, setting the pace for the “progressive web app” craze that would soon follow. The specification continued to mature, and browsers continued to improve their adoption, and this fueled Lyza’s interest throughout the time we worked together. She developed excellent resources to help her fellow web developer to discover and understand the new tech. Among new web platform features, service workers has a reputation for being somewhat nebulous, so her work here was especially important.

She’s not a one-trick pony, though. Lyza’s also deeply interested in robotics. She had contributed to the Johnny Five framework long before applying to Bocoup, and she kept on tinkering after she joined up. She supported the release of the Johnny 5 Inventor Kit by contributing to the Experimenter Guide. My personal favorite project of hers was “The Sunrise Machine,” a device which would capture the first moments of each day. She wrote an extensive tutorial so anyone could make their own, and she released all her code under a F/OSS license. She even wrote a book on the topic: JavaScript on Things (published earlier this year–check it out!).

When called on to contribute to the web-platform-tests project, her trademark attention to detail allowed her to spot the subtlest of bugs in the foundations of the web. She wrote about the experience on our blog; you really ought to read that post. No doubt, Lyza could have spent years tracking down those cracks in the platform, and with our new focus on interoperability and standards, we would have been happy to support her.

…Except her heart just wasn’t in it. Lyza’s always been a practitioner, at her happiest when tinkering with new technology and building novel systems. We’ll miss her dedication and her charm, but we’re happy she’s staying true to what inspires her. Hack on, Lyza.