About Me

My name is Logan Franken.

I’m a senior engineering lead. I live in Brooklyn.

I love making code work for people. I work as a full-stack engineer at Indeed, helping people get jobs.

My e-mail is loganfranken@gmail.com. I’m on itch.io, GitHub, and LinkedIn.

Games

In the past few years, I’ve picked up indie game development as a hobby. I participated in the Js13k games competition a few times (2014, 2015, and 2016).

Outside of competition, I’ve released two full games: Blackjack and Dew Drop Swap, both games exploring ideas about autonomy and control.

Projects

To stay fresh, I like to work on fun side projects. Most recently, I worked on a small React app to try and predict when a RTX 3070 would go on sale at Best Buy.

In more consequential work, I was honored to volunteer for yəhaw̓, a groundbreaking Indigenous-centered project series. For the yəhaw̓ website, I built an interactive map and a search widget.

A recurring focus of my work in the past has been open-source and higher education. One of my favorite projects was an open-source implementation of the federal expected family contribution formula. Most of the University of California institutions use these libraries to power their net price calculators, which prospective students use to estimate the cost of college.

I also tried building out a search engine for open-source higher education projects. It never took off, but it was inspiring to bring together so many wonderful projects in one place.

Presentations

Public speaking is a skill I’ve gradually developed over time: as a junior developer, I served as the chair of a Developer Collaboration Group for several years within my department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, hosting trainings and facilitating discussion.

I eventually branched out beyond our department, becoming the president of the university Toastmasters group and the chair of the Web Standards Group, hosting workshops on HTML5, jQuery, responsive design, web accessibility, and web standards.

Other departments around campus have also asked me to present on creating dynamic web content and creating responsive content.

Gaining confidence within the university, I finally branched out to talking at conferences, including 2013 HighEd Web West, 2016 HighEd Web West, 2016 HighEd Web, UCCSC, and MMWCon.