Tara Vancil
Software Engineer at Northwoods Digital
Michigan, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolTara Vancil is a software engineer and founder of Northwoods Digital with 11 years of experience building both front-end and back-end systems for product and platform teams. She has shipped production features at companies from Stripe and Indeed to Glitch and VotingWorks, and co-founded the experimental Beaker Browser to explore peer-to-peer web capabilities. Her work spans UI polish and developer tooling to secure account management—contributing backend fixes and 2FA/password flows to the well-known SecureDrop project and UX improvements to Beaker. Comfortable operating as an individual studio owner or inside large engineering organizations, she focuses on reliable, test-backed solutions and performance instrumentation. Based in Michigan, she balances a deep technical curiosity with a love of the outdoors, often bringing practical, user-centered thinking to privacy-forward and distributed web projects.
11 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
College Dropout, Pre-Medicine/Pre-Medical Studies, College Dropout, Pre-Medicine/Pre-Medical Studies at Central Michigan University
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (25)
javascript10
python10
sec10
css10
user-authentication10
authentication10
ui-design10
flask-ask10
uid10
two-factor-authentication10
front-end-development10
html10
journalism10
web-development10
flask10
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
beakerbrowser/beaker
Oct 2016 - Sep 2018
An experimental peer-to-peer Web browser
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:2137 commits, 82 PRs, 943 pushes in 1 year 11 months
Contributions summary:Tara focused on UI and front-end development tasks. They implemented new features for the Beaker Browser, including adding a view for workspace directories, a link for sharing projects, and new icons. They also made changes to styles, particularly in the files listing area. These changes appear to be centered around improving the user interface for the Beaker browser.
reactbrowserelectronhyperspacep2p
freedomofpress/securedrop
Aug 2015 - Sep 2015
GitHub repository for the SecureDrop whistleblower platform. Do not submit tips here!
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:9 commits, 4 PRs, 6 comments in 28 days
Contributions summary:Tara primarily focused on enhancing the journalist account management features within the SecureDrop platform. They implemented functionality for password updates, two-factor authentication resets (Google Authenticator & Yubikey), and codename regeneration. In addition, the user added tests to ensure the proper functionality of these account-related features, and added confirmation prompts to UI elements before specific actions. The changes included modifications to templates, journalist-related Python code, and CSS/JS to support these new features.
usabilitypythonsubmitflask-applicationsecuredrop
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