Work
Ten years building the app at Lioness, plus a festival talk, a London panel, a podcast that lasted two episodes, and a sprinkle of teaching.
Lioness
Lioness makes smart vibrators. Sensors pick up how your body responds, and the app turns that into charts you can learn from, and literally see your orgasm with.
The bigger goal is closing the research gap between male and female pleasure. We put the data in the hands of the people it's about, and we team up with researchers to validate it and get it published in peer-reviewed journals.
I wrote the original Bluetooth code that connects the vibrator to the app, and these days I run app development.
Some things I've built
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Live biofeedback
Visualizations that draw on screen in real time (and stay smooth on my Array of Ancient Androids).
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Long-distance play
Partners in different cities control each other's vibrator. I built it mostly so people would stop asking us about it.
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Literally everything else (brag)
I designed and built the systems, the architecture, the data layer, and every aspect of the UI. I fully own the app.
Mothership
Mothership is a women-only feminist festival in the California desert: camping, yoga, sex and pleasure panels, and Tegan and Sara on the lineup. And... also me?
I gave a 30-minute talk, and ended it with pleasure superlatives. Nylon wrote about the festival, and Lioness gets a shout-out.
Pleasure superlatives
- Longest orgasm
- Strongest contraction
Black Tech Fest, London 2022
After triple-checking that they meant to invite me to Black Tech Fest, I excitedly joined a panel called "The Tech Powering Sex." The other panelists were all sex-tech founders, and I did my best to keep up as a lowly engineer. It was also my first trip overseas, so I was excited to be able to represent Lioness and talk about the app and the research we do, and then tour the city of London afterward.
Do They F*ck? NSFW
Anna (our CEO) and I had a podcast where we watched movie sex scenes and reviewed them, as two women who know a lot about female pleasure and very little about movies. I came up with the concept, and we recorded most of the episodes from my bedroom.
We released exactly two episodes before the budget ran out, which is a shame, because it was a ton of fun. One day I'll do something with the 4 unreleased episodes (like blackmail Anna).
Needless to say, I've been having fun. I feel incredibly lucky to get to work on something that I'm so passionate about. To be able to build something that truly had never been done, translating data people had never seen into something that could help them understand their bodies better, has been equal parts challenging and rewarding. I've grown tremendously as a developer and as a person, and I feel lucky to be able to do this work with such a talented team.
Nucamp, 2020
In 2020, while everyone else was learning to make sourdough, I spent a few months teaching React Native part-time at Nucamp, a coding bootcamp for people learning on nights and weekends. Like everything else that year, class had just moved onto Zoom.
Every student built the same app: a directory of campsites with names like React Lake and Redux Woods, complete with a reservation form. So I spent the pandemic teaching people how to book camping trips nobody was allowed to take.
Quick Draw
I also built Quick Draw, an iPhone app for racing card games, mostly so I could play with my sister. It's a hobby (allegedly), so it lives on my hobbies page.
The resume version of all this is on LinkedIn. And a little bit more about how I got here is on my about page.