CSDTs

Culturally Situated Design Tools are the Center for Generative Justice's platform, created and led by Dr. Ron Eglash — his life's work. Students learn math and computing through the "heritage algorithms" in African fractals, cornrow braids, Native beadwork, quilting, graffiti, and more, then use them to create designs of their own. About 6,000 people use it in a typical month, and dozens of partner teachers bring it into their classrooms.

It's a long-lived Django platform, first built by other engineers. I joined the team in 2018 adding content — background sections, new photos, smaller updates. In mid-2019 I moved on to building applications: translating the original Flash apps into JavaScript, creating new ones, and writing workbooks and tutorials.

Since late 2020 I've been the primary developer, in charge of all of it — maintaining, fixing, and extending the platform and its apps, and moving it from University of Michigan servers to Fly and finally to AWS, where the Center hosts it themselves. By now I've had a hand in just about everything on the site.