November 2022 Employee of the Month

Anne is the lead developer for the Gato content management system (CMS). Most of her work takes place behind the scenes, but the benefits of her labor are visible throughout the university’s web presence. From mobile-first (Calico) design enhancements, to system-wide accessibility improvements, Anne’s work has helped improve the user experience for website visitors and editors alike for many years.

While most other universities with a CMS and editor network as complex as TXST’s (e.g. - 1000+ editors, 400+ websites) have an entire team of developers, Anne manages most of the day-to-day development for Gato’s 8-week release cycle herself by being highly organized and ambitious. She is quick to identify tasks that need attention and take ownership before work is assigned and has one of the highest outputs on the Mobile/Web Systems development team. Anne is also well known for being a strong communicator. These attributes lead to her recent move to a formal code reviewer role in one of our largest development projects. Her evaluations and mentorship of newer team members have helped our team maintain stricter coding standards as we make changes, as well as discover and resolve issues more quickly and comprehensively.

Anne embodies TR's core values by consistently making decisions in the best interest of the university. Her focus on users is especially noticeable in the continuous way she invests in improving accessibility to ensure the university’s web presence is user friendly to visitors with assistive technologies. Over the past two years, she has removed most of the system-level accessibility issues. These improvements have allowed the Gato support team to shift their focus to editor-introduced content issues, which not only creates a time savings in our team, it also improves editor behavior since the recouped time is spent on editor training and consultation. Anne's contributions are invaluable to the university and our team, and we are thrilled she is being recognized as the November 2022 TR Employee of the Month!