# Mercie Coles (@mercie.dev)

Profile: https://sifa.id/p/mercie.dev
Headline: A passionate community manager, writer, Kotlin developer and hobbyist educator. I get around.
Website: https://mercie.dev

## About

A long-time Python developer, more recently moving on to non-Android Kotlin, including running a Discord community for Kotlin developers of all types. I have tons of community management experience, primarily on Discord, with a wide understanding of minority issues and how to address them in a community space - including LGBT issues and neurodivergences.

Community management experience goes back over a decade, with prominent examples including over a year as co-owner of the Python Discord server, as well as management and policy work at both the Fabric and Quilt Minecraft mod-loader communities.

My interests include writing, some lighter levels of gaming, vector-based graphic design and, of course, community management. I also enjoy both frontend and backend development work, but it's secondary to my community management obligations.

## Experience

- **Bus Escort at St. Francis Special School** (2015 – 2016)
  Looking after a group of special needs children on the schoolbus, on their way to and from school. Ensuring they arrive safely and on time, keeping track of absences, and keeping them safe and happy on the journey.
- **Software Programmer at Aviso Novate** (2012 – 2013)
  Working on a payment switching software in Clojure (not one of my favourite languages), with technologies like HornetQ and Tapestry. Lots of experience gained here with CI and version control.
  
  Also rewrote a Western Union application in Node.JS, for a proof of concept.
- **Software Programmer (Work Placement) at Datazone Ltd.** (2009 – 2009)
  Working with C++ and Qt on software known as mmVisor, a monitoring and management application for Datazone's Miramo document processing platform.
  
  This was a short work placement in conjunction with my school.
- **Community Manager at FabricMC** (2020 – 2020)
  In this position, I was given the title of "Moderator" as part of my efforts to help the community recover from a controversy rooted in mismanagement and ignorance of minority issues. While I feel like I managed to make the best of a bad situation during my time here, it became clear that the administration didn't share my goals and I realized that I was going to be unable to improve things further.
- **Community Manager at Kotlin Discord UG** (2020 – present)
  Kotlin Discord UG is a community that I founded, aiming to provide an inclusive, welcoming and useful space for Kotlin developers of all backgrounds and levels of experience. While this community is still relatively small, it's home to my most major current project - Kord Extensions.
- **Office Assistant at Spa GAA** (2018 – 2023)
  Office work - Printing, filing, maintaining the website, handling email and phone communication. I also got the opportunity to build my own digital signage project, which has been a huge success.
- **Front Desk Receptionist at South Kerry Development Partnership** (2017 – 2018)
  Reception - handling walk-ins and meetings, finding information for people, directing people to those that can help them. Cleaning, handling weekly job sheets, maintaining printers, data entry and filing.
- **Store Assistant at Cleo Gallery** (2016 – 2017)
  Keeping the store running - cleaning and tidying, making sale, pricing, helping customers find what they need, putting out new stock, keeping the stock organised. Also involved running personal errands for the owner, including helping them set up their rental apartment upstairs.
- **Community Owner at The Archives** (2008 – 2015)
  A Minecraft-oriented gaming network that I took ownership of after the previous owner ran out of free time. Picked up tons of experience in a variety of technologies - Linux server management and devops, Python development, some Web technologies like HTML and CSS, CI and management tools like Bamboo, Travis, CircleCI, JIRA, Confluence, and other webapps like MediaWiki, Drupal, Ghost CMS, Anchor CMS and WordPress. Also acquired plenty of experience with version control and project management systems such as Git, SVN, GitHub, Bitbucket, GitLab and Stash.
- **Community Manager at Python Discord** (2018 – 2019)
  Large-scale community management for 12,000 users (at the time), including lots of technical work - Tons of Python development and open source work in a team of around 50 people. This included building a website with a Python backend and some Discord chat automation apps (bots). I gained a lot of experience with devops here, learning about technologies like Saltstack and Docker, and working with Azure's devops platform (Pipelines for CI and releases, for example).
  
  Python Discord has some big sponsors - most notably Linode and JetBrains.
- **Volunteer Mentor at CoderDojo (Local)** (2014 – 2017)
  Looking after children and young teenagers, and helping them to learn programming - starting with basic concepts and tools like Scratch, and later moving them on to Python and JavaScript.
- **Community Manager at QuiltMC** (2021 – 2023)
  Following my departure from FabricMC and the numerous controversies that occurred there afterwards, a large group of people split off, intending to create a fork of Fabric that would address Fabric's social, organizational, technical and governmental issues, and eventually become its own mod-loader project.
  
  In this position, I was given a lot more freedom to create the inclusive space that the community needed. Through a combination of progressive policies, appropriate tooling, transparency and collaboration with community members, it was much easier to achieve this goal - and to maintain the community afterwards.
  
  QuiltMC has been the target of a number of discriminatory users and groups of trolls. I've aided in defending it - and its users - from them, with a very high level of success.
- **Photo Archivist at South Kerry Development Partnership** (2024 – 2026)
  Scanning historical photo negatives from the 1960s, cleaning them up in a photo editor and organising them. The filing system in place before I joined was problematic, so I ended up replacing it, documenting everything, and creating software to try to keep things organised.

## Education

- **University College Cork** — N/A, Computer Science (2011 – 2012)

## Skills

- Discord
- Policy Writing
- Documentation
- Online Community Moderation
- Microsoft Word
- Raspberry Pi
- Squarespace
- Writing
- Community Management
- Kotlin
- Open Source Development
- Version Control
- Web Development
- Blogging
- Social Media
- Python (Programming Language)
- Linux Server
- Linux
- JavaScript
- WordPress
- HTML5
- CSS3
- ES6
- GitHub
- Git
- SCSS
- Saltstack
- Linux Desktop
- Jekyll
- Photo Editing
- Project Management
- Conveyor
- Gradle
- Windows Administration
- Web Design
- Docker

## Certifications

- Oracle Java Associate (Java SE 6) — Oracle

## Languages

- English (native)

## Other profiles

- website: https://mercie.dev
- github: https://github.com/gdude2002
- codeberg: https://codeberg.org/gdude2002