Interview by Dan Selman, CTO Clause Inc.
Diana, you are a full stack developer at Clause, primarily working on the user interface. What attracted you to Clause?
I found myself attracted to the potential within the company; Clause has identified real problems the legal industry is facing and has situated itself to be at the forefront of solving these issues.
Meeting the team at Clause really sold me on the company. Because Clause has both technological and legal experts, there is a wealth of subject matter expertise across the board. As a young company, everyone on the team is very hands-on and open to collaboration. This makes for an engaging environment that encourages learning throughout the development process.
What are some of the technologies you’ve been enjoying learning recently?
We’re building our front-end using React. While I knew React fairly well before coming to Clause, it’s been a pleasure continuing to learn new tricks for such a powerful library. There’s always more to learn! React allows front-end code to be very organized and reusable, making our program easier to maintain and debug in the long run. It allows Clause to create a comprehensive and complex user interface that is still intuitive for the consumer to use.
I’ve also been enjoying learning LoopBack, a Node.js framework that helps us create REST APIs quickly and easily. I really love the GUI API Explorer they’ve created that allows you to see and test routes in your browser.
Lastly, I’ve recently delved into Cypress, a fairly new end-to-end testing tool that has been a huge help in making sure our program performs as intended.
Are there any technologies you want to learn in the future, or any that you think are particularly relevant to Clause?
The talk around using machine learning to analyze natural language text is really interesting, so I would love to explore this area more. This technology could benefit Clause by detecting non-smart portions of a contract that could be replaced by smart clauses, making it easier for users to know when and where it would make sense to use smart clauses. This technology could also potentially help with automating template creation, which I think could add great efficiency to the process.
What do you like to do when you aren’t programming?
I’ve recently started playing Magic: the Gathering, a fantasy card game where players battle each other using creatures and spells. Sometimes my boyfriend and I will play at The Geekery in Astoria, Queens.
I love walking around and exploring the city on a nice day. There’s always something new to see in New York! When the weather doesn’t allow for outdoor activities, I enjoy practicing yoga.
On my morning commute, I’m usually trying to complete the New York Times’ daily crossword puzzle, but I find tackling them to be the most fun on the weekends when I can enlist a friend or two to help.
