# Emelia (@thisismissem.social)

Profile: https://sifa.id/p/thisismissem.social
Headline: Independent Social Web Developer / Founder of Unobvious Technology UG

## About

Emelia Smith is an expert in Node.js, React & GraphQL with over a decade of experience as a software engineer. Her approach to software development is data-centric and developer-supportive, balancing both team needs and product requirements. She finds mentoring and pair-programming really rewarding, and excels at planning and developing solutions for long-term timescales.

At present, Emelia is focused on trust & safety for the open social web, making contributions to projects using both AT Protocol and ActivityPub. I'm also working as a freelancer with clients in each protocol.

## Experience

- **Web Frontend Engineer at NapalmRiot** (2008 – 2009)
  Emelia was one of the senior frontend engineers, working remotely from Australia with this predominantly US based team was a highly formative experience, and she gave vast insight into how to manage and work within distributed teams, and communicate technical ideas.
  
  She worked on build a complete rich JavaScript and CSS framework to accelerate product development.
- **Contract Software Engineer at Uxebu GmbH** (2009 – 2010)
  Worked with a German team building developer tools & prototypes with Dojo Toolkit.
- **Senior Software Engineer at IDAGIO** (2015 – 2016)
  Lead the development of their frontend architecture, developing patterns for Redux that back their Web player. These patterns are still in use today, four years later.
  
  Later moved on to rearchitecting their backend into a series of services, each responsible for distinct datasets. Used Ruby & SQL to write an ETL to move data from PostgreSQL to Elasticsearch.
  
  Also helped implement the CDN architecture, and teach the managing director how to use BI tools like Periscope.
- **Training Specialist at GraphQL Training – BrandedCode** (2016 – 2017)
  You may have recently been told about a new technology called GraphQL, so now you're wanting to learn more with professional training for yourself or your team.
  
  Book a training session, and I'll teach you about GraphQL & how to make use of it for you and your team.
- **Senior Software Engineer at ResearchGate** (2017 – 2017)
  Refactoring legacy code to react.
- **Senior Fullstack Developer at Highsnobiety** (2018 – 2018)
  Helped develop the Cloudflare Workers based proxy to allow them to go from Wordpress to React. Also worked a bit on E-commerce with CommerceTools
- **Senior Software Engineer at Quandoo** (2019 – 2020)
  Working with Apache Kafka to develop applications on the Kappa Architecture using Node.js, TypeScript, and React.
- **Advisor at IFTAS** (2023 – 2025)
  Working with the non-profit's board as an advisor, with a focus on technical implementation and review. IFTAS focuses on improving trust and safety across independent and federated social media.
- **Freelance Software Engineer at Germ Network** (2025 – present)
  Germ Network, the End-to-End Encrypted Messenger built on AT Protocol, came to me with a problem: Their OAuth implementation was having problems, and they needed them fixed before launch.
  
  I've helped them rework their OAuth implementation to be more reliable, contributing to various open source dependencies that they use.
- **Consultant at balena** (2013 – 2014)
  A platform for developing and delivering Internet of Things and Connected Computing products and services. Hired to work on the initial marketing and developer outreach strategy, given her vast experience contributing to open-source, giving technical presentations, and handling developer relations. (I worked for their predecessor Resin.io)
- **Independent Consultant at BrandedCode** (2007 – 2010)
  Worked with a variety of clients on a variety of projects, mainly website builds and open-source integrations.
- **Software Engineer at Pusher** (2011 – 2011)
  Maintained and scaled Realtime Web Infrastructure, as part of her work, Emelia was required to attend various conferences and handle some developer relations. As the team at Pusher was small at the time, Emelia was also on-call for handling outages and uptime.
- **Technical Lead - IFTAS CCS at IFTAS** (2023 – 2024)
  Designed and lead development of the IFTAS CCS project for content classification for the fediverse, detecting and alerting when CSAM is posted to enrolled instances.
  
  Worked with Node.js, Adonis.js, Kafka, Kubernetes, and Terraform.
- **Founder & Managing Director at Unobvious Technology UG** (2017 – present)
  We're building tech for people who don't have access to most mainstream tech; They do jobs just like us, and work hard every day, so why shouldn't they have tech that empowers them to do their jobs safely and efficiently? We're building tech for Sex Workers and the Adult Industry.
- **Frontend Developer at State** (2012 – 2013)
  State is building an opinion network for the world, a town square to share opinions. I worked as a front-end developer for them, working with their custom front-end framework, Eyebrow.js (similar to Ember, Meteor and Angular). This was built on Dojo Toolkit and Node.js; Other roles included building HTML emails and working heavily with Mailchimp.
- **Open Social Web Developer at Self-employed** (2023 – present)
  In 2023, I started working on Fediverse projects full-time, contributing to Mastodon, and working on improving Trust & Safety tooling for federated social media.
  
  During 2024, I worked with IFTAS as a client, founded the ActivityPub Trust & Safety taskforce, and also contributed to Mastodon. With IFTAS, I lead the development of the IFTAS Content Classification Service and IFTAS FediCheck service. In Mastodon I made major improvements to their OAuth implementation and contributed moderation features.
  
  In 2025, I built FediMod FIRES, a tool for distributing moderation data to Fediverse servers, which was funded by an NLNet NGI0 Entrust grant, whilst also doing some freelance work.
  
  Now, I'm building with AT Protocol, who adopted the Client ID Metadata Documents internet draft I co-authored for OAuth.
  
  You can hire me to help you build for the open social web.
- **Senior Software Engineer at Votizen** (2010 – 2011)
  Worked on data mining from social media and natural language processing with Node.js. Responsible for hiring and growing their team for developing Node.js.
- **Contract Software Engineer at SimpleTax** (2014 – 2014)
  Worked on User Experience and User Interactions, designing new features. Also worked on improving the code quality of an ageing and complex codebase built with Backbone.js and Django, written in JavaScript and Python.
- **Contract Software Developer at NTS Radio** (2014 – 2015)
  Development and deployment of user-facing website, metadata API, and content management system. Also involved improving network, studio and streaming infrastructure.
- **Independent Software Consultant at BrandedCode** (2014 – 2015)
  In 2010, the studio was shut down to focus on working at various startups. Fast forward four years, the studio relaunched. For the following two years, we partnered with startups, accelerating their grow and product development. Some of our clients include Motivii Limited, Driftrock Marketing, and Resin.io
- **Software Development Consultant at FreightHub GmbH** (2016 – 2016)
  Researched & improved node.js performance metrics using flamegraphs, mongodb optimisations and statsd/graphite. Also participated heavily in architecture discussions for future projects, and actively reviewed code helping the development team produce higher quality code.
- **Data Engineer at Ada Health** (2017 – 2017)
  Unfortunately not the Data Engineering we'd expect, but instead lead the effort to clean up their mess of a Redux, Sagas, and React Native Application.
- **Technical Lead at First Asset HR** (2018 – 2018)
  Consulting Tech Lead, working with them to build our their initial development team and tech stack.
- **Senior Fullstack Developer at Movinga** (2019 – 2019)
  Helped maintain & develop Ruby on Rails backends, assisted with frontend development, mentored colleagues & helped write GitLab CI configurations
- **Senior Software Engineer at Yara International** (2020 – 2021)
  Developing tooling, platforms, and patterns to empower developers at Yara Digital Labs to build great products. Primarily working with Node.js and React.
- **Lead Backend Developer at Kano Computing** (2014 – 2014)
  Developing the initial generation of web infrastructure and user platform services using Node.js, Amazon Web Services, and various database technologies. This infrastructure needed to be developed to be highly scalable from the start, as we already had a large consumer market share.
  
  Kano produces a platform and product to encourage people to learn about computers and how they work.
- **Contract Software Developer at Driftrock** (2014 – 2014)
  Lead Developer on the Driftrock Elements product, which has since been rebranded as one of Driftrock's core product offering as Driftrock Triggers. The product helps marketing team trigger ads at highly relevant times, increasing return on investment of advertising spending.
  
  The product was in Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, JavaScript (React/Backbone.js), and a custom user query engine.
- **Software Development Contractor at Motivii** (2015 – 2015)
  Working with Eamon (the CEO) and his team, Emelia helped them launch their initial offering by building out the backend of their application. She took a lead role in designing the user experience of the onboarding journey for web.
  
  Development was Ruby on Rails, DynamoDB, and Complex Event Processing (used for big data and analytics processing).
- **Software Engineer at Eurosky / Stichting Modal** (2026 – 2026)
  Launched Eurosky portal
- **Software Engineer at Bluesky Social PBC** (2026 – present)
  Working on the PDS

## Education

- **Charles Sturt University** — Computer Science (2008 – 2009)

## Skills

- Tailwind CSS
- Facebook API
- AT Protocol
- TypeScript
- Data Engineering
- MVC
- Adonis.js
- Apache Kafka
- Site Reliability Engineering
- Cross-browser Compatibility
- APIs
- Web Standards
- jQuery
- SQL
- Redux.js
- MailChimp
- Databases
- MongoDB
- JSON
- REST
- MySQL
- Ruby
- Spa
- Start-ups
- Information Architecture
- Programming
- Agile Methodologies
- User Experience
- Software Development
- Git
- JavaScript
- Terraform
- System Architecture
- Technical Advisory
- OAuth
- Platform Engineering
- Technical Leadership
- ActivityPub
- Swift (Programming Language)
- Dojo
- English
- Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- React Native
- GraphQL
- Content Management Systems (CMS)
- Ruby on Rails
- React.js
- XHTML
- HTML
- Extract, Transform, Load (ETL)
- Front-end
- Email Marketing
- SEO
- OOP
- Mobile Applications
- Web Applications
- Web Development
- PostgreSQL
- Open Source
- Node.js
- GitHub
- Kubernetes
- Project Management
- Advisory Boards
- Expert Advisor
- Nest.js
- Software Architecture
- Solid
- AT Protocol

## Projects

- **Decentralizing FedCM** — https://atproto.com/blog/working-to-decentralize-fedcm
  Bluesky Social PBC have given a grant to Emelia Smith, an Invited Expert with the FedID Working Group, to work on FedCM with the goal of making FedCM really work for the decentralized web.
- **Node Websocket Server** — https://github.com/miksago/node-websocket-server/
  First spec-compliant WebSocket server for Node.js, Development ended September 2011, officially deprecated and removed from NPM August 2014.
- **Endotracker** — https://github.com/thisismissem/endotracker
  A small app for tracking endocrinology data over time, allowing better comparison between results
- **Questionable.fyi** — https://questionable.fyi
  Everyone has questions, let's get some answers!

## Publications

- Don't celebrate this — thisismissem.leaflet.pub (https://thisismissem.leaflet.pub/3moh7otauq22g)
- On being believed — thisismissem.leaflet.pub (https://thisismissem.leaflet.pub/3moeir3ek4s2d)
- On being valued — thisismissem.leaflet.pub (https://thisismissem.leaflet.pub/3miajjbhi6c2w)
- On being slow — thisismissem.leaflet.pub (https://thisismissem.leaflet.pub/3mgsrrotbj22l)
- Working to Decentralize FedCM — decentralizing-fedcm.leaflet.pub (https://decentralizing-fedcm.leaflet.pub/3mggfw4gdx22w)
- Are you in the right room? — thisismissem.leaflet.pub (https://thisismissem.leaflet.pub/3mersxir26k2q)
- On Financial Insecurity — thisismissem.leaflet.pub (https://thisismissem.leaflet.pub/3mdh4yan3xs23)
- Space for change — thisismissem.leaflet.pub (https://thisismissem.leaflet.pub/3md6hz3ug2c2c)
- Introducing Realtime — Node.js Dublin (https://speakerdeck.com/miksago/introducing-realtime-nodejs-dublin)
- Sub-Protocols Over Websockets — Keeping It Realtime Conference (https://vimeo.com/41370570)
- The Noded Podcast
- The Changelog Podcast — RIZN Media
- Emelia's Writings (https://writings.thisismissem.social)

## Volunteering

- Open Source Developer at Mastodon
- Open Source Developer at Solid
- Volunteer at Ziferblat UK
- Volunteer at IFTAS
- Technical Advisor at Hachyderm.io
- Open Source Developer at Mastodon
- Open Source Developer at Node.js

## Languages

- English (native)
- German (elementary)

## Other profiles

- github: https://github.com/thisismissem