Jerome Paulos
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

I’m a developer, photojournalist, and computer wizard (thanks Grandma!) from Berkeley, California. I’m currently majoring in computer science at Brown University.

Last summer, I was a software engineering intern at The Markup, a digital publication that covers the effects of Big Tech on government, business, and civil society. I maintained Blacklight and its public API, high-traffic tools that scan sites for privacy issues. I also worked on their system for custom interactive graphics and wrote a blog post about my experience.

In the summers of 2020 and 2022, I worked at Berkeleyside helping to migrate content and code to Newspack. It was fascinating to see how an already modern, digital-only newsroom handled the sudden shift to remote work and the never-ending stream of coronavirus news.

In 2021, I was a data science intern at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation where I was trained in HIPAA compliance and helped visualize hepatitis C patient pathways. I handled sensitive patient data and learned how clear visualization can help understand large data sets.


I have a cynical view of most enterprise software and try to create high-quality user experiences with my personal projects and freelance work.

I created 75grand, a mobile app with resources and tools for students at Macalester, my old college. It’s used by nearly half of all students (November 2023) as a result of an extensive on-campus marketing campaign. (React Native, Laravel)

In the summer of 2023, I helped Ava Community Energy build a tool to help customers navigate the complicated eligibility requirements of government incentives that subsidize reducing carbon emissions. (Laravel, Svelte)

I am currently working with Ben Borgers and Ben Paulos to bring it to other municipalities in the form of a SaaS product called Govcentives. (Laravel, Livewire)

I also created smol.rsvp (Laravel, Svelte) and maintain War Room (Laravel, React) with Ben Borgers, a social to-do list app used by a few hundred college students.

In high school, I was a photojournalist, designer, and developer for the Berkeley High Jacket and am responsible for their branding, slogan, and WordPress-based website. I formed the Jacket’s web team, currently headed by Eliot Hertenstein.


I’m always looking for ways technology can provide a delightful solution to shared problems, no matter how small.

When roommmate announcements were delayed by a bug in Macalester’s ancient housing portal, I crowdsourced matches for about 30% of the class with a Google Sheets-based tool.

When my high school released more than 5,000 unfilterable photos from graduation, I quickly created a facial-recognition tool to search them that was used by many of my classmates.

When graduations were impacted by COVID-19, I created interactive message boards to collect community messages. Hundreds of families shared photos, congratulations, and memories in dozens of languages.