“Commit engineer Hector Yeomans discusses his approach to improving government transparency using his coding knowledge.”

I wanted to create a simple, blazing-fast “Notion-lite” that would let you make easily shareable notes and collaborate in real time, with no account required. Of course, the experience also had to be seamless between web and mobile. Thus, Sharenotes was born.

I chose React and Node.js for the tech stack because of their popularity with startups and my unfamiliarity with them. My background is in procedural programming, so the architecture of Node, with its asynchronous event loop, is new to me. But I was eager to dive in and learn. This tech stack seemed ideal for an app in which data is pushed to the client as the server retrieves and parses it.

Commit wants me to spend a week on anything I like? I was going to have to come up with something—and fast. I’ve been in this game long enough to know that if I have to demo next Thursday I’d better have something 95 percent finished by Monday. The last five percent of any job takes at least 50 percent of the time. I know that math doesn’t add up, but, dear reader, am I wrong?

Commit’s culture of innovation is immediately apparent when you join. Every new engineer starts with a one-week internal hackathon onboarding project. I’m interested in learning more about machine learning, so I chose to build a very basic facial recognition tool that allows you to sign in to a website using your webcam.

Thomas Choo joined Commit recently as an Engineering Partner and writes about how he solved some product issues in his Commit Hackathon Onboarding Project.

When you join Commit as an Engineer, it becomes very clear that the company’s core values are centered around the idea of Engineer happiness. With that in mind, I knew that I wanted to work on something that could make the lives of Commit Engineers easier.