Diedra Rater

Frontend engineer with a background in visual design and over 7 years’ experience building production web applications with a focus on accessibility. Specializes in closely collaborating with design to produce smooth and joyful experiences for all users.

Senior Frontend Engineer | Chan Zuckerberg Initiative | 8/2020 - 12/2022

• Developed reusable components to flesh out a design system that could be leveraged to build new features faster with consistent branding and a reliable level of accessibility.
• Participated in critiquing designs for accessibility concerns, technical constraints, effective UX, and aesthetics; supported a new lead designer after the previous one left.
• Designed and implemented animation and polish to web frontend features, such as loading state spinners and success state confetti, using sprite sheets, After Effects, and Lottie.
• Led a project to investigate if Rive would be a better solution for animations than Lottie. • Prototyped design concepts to stress test potential features ahead of development.

Software Engineer | Khan Academy | 5/2016 - 7/2020

• Led 6 person cross-functional team to update content forum feature frontend code to be accessible, responsive, and use brand guidelines; triaged QA tickets to prioritize accessibility.
• Created and led an accessibility group to share knowledge across roles and teams.
• Co-led internship program, synced with mentors and interns to ensure the intern’s success, facilitated technical talks and docs for onboarding, and planned a hackathon.
• Mentored software engineer interns and junior devs through code reviews, answering technical questions, and pairing on git, feature development, and debugging.
• Improved web accessibility level by fixing issues in rounds of audits by an external firm. • Collaborated with designers and PMs to develop new features to spec from designs.
  • Investigated and solved technical product issues resulting from cross-team integration. • Rapidly iterated on A/B tests to answer questions for user engagement and retention.
• Improved tools for translation teams to more efficiently localize content.

Software Engineer | Q42 | 3/2015 - 2/2016

• Worked with venture-backed startups in a San Francisco incubator to develop iterative end-to- end IoT prototypes for mobile web and Android in weekly sprints.
• Built internal business tools for tracking incoming projects and employee time off.
• Migrated company website codebase from CoffeeScript to JavaScript for maintainability.

• Hack Reactor | full-stack JavaScript bootcamp
• Iowa State University | Bachelor of Fine Arts