Kate Higa - Software Engineer at GitHub

Kate Higa

Software Engineer at GitHub

New York City Metropolitan Area United States

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Summary

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Rockstar

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Top School

Kate Higa is a software engineer with a decade of experience building accessible, user-centered web applications across startups and large tech firms. A UC Berkeley Cognitive Science and Computer Science graduate, she blends human-centered thinking with full-stack Rails and React expertise, having shipped component libraries and tooling consumed across products. At GitHub she works on accessibility, contributing ARIA-enhanced UI components and Storybook accessibility testing, and previously led frontend consistency and accessibility efforts at Informed K12. Her IBM experience includes developing a shared React component library for Watson Studio and earning a team excellence award for collaboration on Watson Studio Local GA 2.0. Kate is drawn to the psychology of tech interaction and applies that curiosity to create tooling that empowers users while reducing friction for developers. Based in the New York City area, she contributes to notable open-source projects like Primer view_components and CASA, bridging nonprofit impact and enterprise-scale systems.

10 years of coding experience

3 years of employment as a software developer

Cognitive Science Computer Science, Cognitive Science Computer Science at University of California, Berkeley

Korean, Japanese, English

Github Skills (24)

accessibility10

ruby-rails10

storybook10

manager10

rspec10

rails10

ui-design10

casa10

ruby10

uid10

manage10

front-end-development10

viewcomponent10

management10

postgresql9

Programming languages (8)

MDXTypeScriptCSSShellSCSSJavaScriptHTMLRuby

Github contributions (5)

primer/view_components

Apr 2021 - Dec 2022

ViewComponents for the Primer Design System

Role in this project:

Front-end Developer

Contributions:1 release, 232 reviews, 130 commits in 1 year 8 months

Contributions summary:Kate primarily contributed to the development of UI components for the Primer Design System. Their work involved modifying and enhancing existing view components, specifically addressing accessibility concerns. This included adding ARIA labels to improve accessibility for screen readers. Furthermore, the user enabled accessibility testing tools within the Storybook environment, ensuring UI component quality.

primerrailsviewcomponentsprimer-designruby

rubyforgood/casa

Oct 2020 - Feb 2021

Volunteer management system for nonprofit CASA, which serves foster youth in counties across America.

Role in this project:

Full-stack Developer

Contributions:10 reviews, 8 commits, 8 PRs in 4 months

Contributions summary:Kate implemented new features and enhancements to the Ruby on Rails application, focusing on the volunteer management system for the non-profit CASA organization. Their contributions included adding functionality for supervisors and admins to manage court report due dates, introducing a Judge model, and adding a notes column with expand/collapse functionality to the case contact table. They also addressed UI issues and implemented report downloads, including the ability to download already-generated court reports.

servesyouthr4gmanagement-systemcasa

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