Svenja Schäfer - Development Team Lead at thoughtbot

Svenja Schäfer

Development Team Lead at thoughtbot

Villa de Otura, Andalusia, Spain

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Summary

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Rockstar

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Top School

Svenja Schäfer is a Development Team Lead with nine years of experience designing and shipping web applications, currently leading engineering at thoughtbot. She brings strong Ruby on Rails backend expertise—evidenced by a notable contribution to the popular participatory-democracy framework decidim, where she implemented an elections import feature with controllers, forms, permissions and tests. Comfortable in both hands-on coding and people leadership, Svenja progressed rapidly from developer to senior roles and now leads teams to deliver pragmatic, production-ready solutions. Based in Andalusia, she pairs a background in web development education and mentoring with earlier communications and community-focused roles, blending technical craft with user-centered thinking. Dog lover and RegExp admirer, she often surfaces practical, test-driven fixes that improve localization and permissions in complex open-source codebases.

9 years of coding experience

13 years of employment as a software developer

Web Developer, Web Development, Ruby on Rails, Web Developer, Web Development, Ruby on Rails at CareerFoundry

Web Developer (JavaScript and Node.js), Web Development, Web Developer (JavaScript and Node.js), Web Development at New York Code + Design Academy

Bachelor of Professional Media Engineering, Digitale Kommunikation und Medien/Multimedien, Bachelor of Professional Media Engineering, Digitale Kommunikation und Medien/Multimedien at Fernseh Akademie Mitteldeutschland

Diplom, Journalismus, Diplom, Journalismus at Freie Journalistenschule Berlin

German, English, French

Github Skills (9)

databases10

rails10

back-end-development10

ruby-on-rails10

database10

rspec9

par8

e-government7

Programming languages (5)

RustJavaScriptHTMLRubyPython

Github contributions (5)

decidim/decidim

Jun 2020 - Sep 2021

The participatory democracy framework. A generator and multiple gems made with Ruby on Rails

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:110 reviews, 30 commits, 35 PRs in 1 year 2 months

Contributions summary:Svenja contributed significantly to the `decidim/decidim` project, specifically focusing on the "Import from proposals to answers" feature within the elections module. They implemented controllers, forms, and routes, along with associated permissions and localization updates. Code changes reflect adding functionality to import proposals into elections answers, including form creation, permission adjustments, and tests.

participatory-democracycivic-techgovernmentdemocracyparticipation

slickepinne/nycda

Jan 2017 - May 2017

Contributions:44 PRs, 72 pushes, 28 branches in 4 months

cssjavascriptweb-development-coursehtml5web-development

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