Profile: Kathleen Fleischmann, Web Application Developer
“Even the things you can’t see as a user are critical to making the experience of using an app a positive one.”
Where are you currently located?
Brattleboro, VT
Where are you from originally?
Bloomfield Hills, MI
What did you major in college?
Business Information Systems
When did you join NPR?
August 2011. As it happened, the call with the job offer came in while I was attending the Newport Folk Festival. That year NPR produced a poster for the festival and I ran around getting it signed by as many artists as possible to commemorate the occasion. It now hangs framed in my living room.
When did you start working remotely?
I originally worked out of the Boston office and became full-time remote when it closed in Sept 2017.
What are you currently working on or have you recently worked on?
I am working on initiatives to enable member stations to create content for the web and to share that content with other stations and NPR. I currently support tools for creating station web sites and sharing content via APIs.
What personally excites you about being a developer?
I have always felt very fortunate that I happened to love doing something that people are actually willing to pay me for. If coding had no market value, I’d still be doing it as a hobby, because it is fun. It is challenging puzzle-solving that results in something new existing in the world. At the end of the day, I think I love being a developer because I have a desire to be creative and make things, but I have no skill for painting or sculpting or that sort of endeavor. I consider myself a back-end developer (although we all work on all aspects of projects), so when I talk of creativity, I’m not referring to the visual aspects of an app. Even the things you can’t see as a user are critical to making the experience of using an app a positive one.
What is your favorite Serendipity Days project that you worked on?
I was excited to work on a Tiny Desk TV concept suggested by Bob Boilen. We explored how we could create a customizable stream of videos that could learn people’s taste and serve them the videos tailored to their tastes.
I hear your team is made up of polyglots, but do you personally have a favored programming language?
Javascript is my default language, especially as it evolves and becomes more robust.
What are some of your hobbies and interests?
I spend most weekends during the summer at music festivals. My favorite aspect of living in the NE is that we have 8+ festivals within a 2 hour drive! I love to travel as well. Last year we rented a campervan and spent two weeks on the road, which included watching the solar eclipse from a campground in Oregon. I also enjoy quilting. I don’t watch TV on a regular basis, so I keep track of what is getting raves and then go on binges where I quilt and watch an entire season in one sitting.
What is your favorite Tiny Desk Concert out of the ones you’ve attended?
Being remote, I haven’t had the opportunity to see too many of them yet, but I just had the opportunity to see 3 of my favorite singer-songwriters perform as I’m With Her. My favorite new discoveries so far are Cigarettes After Sex and Phoebe Bridgers.
Aside from the Tiny Desk Concerts, what are some of your favorite things about working at NPR?
It is exciting to be a part of an organization that I believe is so important to the ability of our country to thrive. An informed public is crucial for democracy and NPR has a unique ability to inform and explain topics in depth in ways that commercial networks don’t. That said, on a day-to-day basis, my favorite thing about working here is the people. We have really smart folks who both challenge and support each other and make coming to work fun.
What are some tech conferences you have attended in the past, and what were your key takeaways?
I attended the API Strat conference when it was in Boston and found it to be one of the most useful conferences I’ve attended in terms of its affect on my day-to-day work. It was really focused on information that made me a more informed developer. I would happily attend it again.
Which tech conferences would you love to attend in the future, and why?
I would love to attend API:World or REST Fest. APIs are the area of technology that I am most interested in, and I find that conferences like these invariably introduce me to concepts or information that I can bring back and make use of.
If you were to speak at a tech conference, what would you love to give a talk about?
If I were to speak at a conference, I think I’d like to address the lessons learned in developing tools for a unique ecosystem where our customers, the member stations, are both external and internal stakeholders to a certain extent. They are independently owned and operated, making them external stakeholders, but they are tightly coupled with NPR, making them internal stakeholders as well. It is both challenging and rewarding.
