Mark43 Intern Diary: Making a Real and Immediate Impact in Govtech
Author: Max Musing, Mark43 Summer 2018 Engineering Intern
Adtech, biotech, edtech, fintech, martech… to an outsider, the endless subcultures of the tech industry seem ridiculous. It’s all just tech, right?
Before getting into the industry, I thought a lot about which startup companies would interest me. Unlimited vacation days and free onsite massages are certainly nice perks but, at the end of the day, product and team culture make-or-break a company. So, I never thought to pursue govtech; it’s full of ugly, legacy software, and the companies are often too corporate for my taste. That said, the appeal of working on a product that could meaningfully impact (or save) people’s lives was drawing me to give it another chance.
Mark43 blew my expectations away. While at the company over the summer, I worked on a project to enhance evidence item profiles in Mark43 RMS. This feature lets officers or detectives attach photos, videos, and other documents to the master record for a piece of evidence. Once the item is stored in a police property room or warehouse, these digital attachments become especially important for investigative work as a case unfolds. Even though my internship was only 12 weeks long, my work is already in production and available to police departments across the United States (and hopefully soon, the world).
Working at Mark43 totally revolutionized my idea of what a govtech company can be. To start, our product design is amazing. Long gone are the clunky Windows 2000-looking desktop apps that look like they come with a 200-page manual. While the Mark43 platform is packed to the brim with configurable functionality, our designers have managed to fit each product into a neatly packaged set of desktop, mobile, and web apps. As part of our onboarding process, one of the company’s co-founders, Matt Polega, walked us through the entire RMS app. It took us just 30 minutes. I think that really says something about the usability of a product as complex as ours.
The technology powering the platform behind the scenes is equally important. Mark43 puts a huge emphasis on leveraging modern, industry-leading software practices; our tech stack includes React, Redux, Reselect, and Recompose… basically everything that starts with “re” (that’s how you know we’re really good). On top of that, our iterative, cloud-based approach to building software allows for a high level of control over security, performance, and scalability. We follow a pretty comprehensive Government Technology Bill of Rights that informs many of our technical decisions.
Finally, I’ve had the pleasure of working closely with a small team of extremely talented designers and developers who genuinely care about the impact and ethics of the software we write. It has become somewhat of a joke that every tech startup is “making the world a better place,” but building great public safety software has a real and immediate impact on first responders and the citizens they serve on a daily basis.
While my time with Mark43 has been short, it has completely changed my perspective on government technology. I’ll miss working with the team, but I’m excited to watch the company grow and expand in the years to come.
