Once again it is my pleasure to announce to you the recipients of this year’s Cathy Lester IT Excellence Award and the Rising Star Award.
About the Recipients
IT Excellence Award – Brian Borowicz, Senior Software Developer/Analyst, School of Law
Brian is the epitome of past, present and future excellence in IT on this campus. He has been instrumental in developing, maintaining, and integrating critical new and existing systems that enable our administrative staff to perform their jobs so effectively. No one at the Law School has as deep of an understanding of the diverse business processes and byzantine behind-the-scenes data. Brian manages the complexity of navigating old systems that have continually been adjusted through the years, finding ways to improve and evolve these applications with our institutional needs. He uses his incredible memory and critical thinking skills to sort through problems and present strategic, innovative, and effective technical solutions. His attention to detail and commitment to quality have been instrumental in the development of dozens of custom applications. He is well-versed not only with the administrative needs of the Law School, but of the University as a whole. For example, when the rollout of a new vendor platform created synchronization issues, Brian worked diligently to ensure the data was fed and translated properly. He also collaborated with ITS to set up a data replication service to build a new dashboard that is tailored to each student based on their admissions or student data.
Brian is naturally a consummate professional who is kind, gracious with his time, and patient. One area where Brian truly shines is his active participation with our departmental clients, mainly our Student Affairs and Admissions offices. Brian always listens as well as he leads, showing a friendly and confident manner. He is known for his famous emails where he answers client questions with such detail that the clients are then educated in the matter. He always has a smile and positive energy to share with the team and everyone he works with at the Law School. Brian has been an active participant in the Software Developer Trainee Program, often being called back to help as a challenge analyst, where he helped mentor new developers. He has also long been involved with the campus-wide College Analyst discussions and meetup groups and works well with analysts around campus to ensure that we are sharing our own data with other departments reliably and securely.
Rising Star Award – Elliot Reymond-Christensen, Senior Software Developer/Analyst, Technology Resources
Elliot’s contributions are significant. He forged new ground in the [Next Generation Platform] with GitHub actions, most recently enabling the build and deploy capabilities the platform needs. He…was eager to dive in and learn new areas, became productive quickly delivering results, while modeling outstanding team work and collaboration. He brings his perspective as a developer (user) to inform the design of NGP’s development environment and tool set that will serve the developer community. His documentation is a shining example of best practice that others can emulate and will be directly usable in the official user documentation portfolio, serving hundreds of developers across the campus. Early on in the project he realized the need to participate in not just the technical track he was assigned to, but to both technical tracks of the project. He took the initiative and extra effort to join both the Infrastructure team and the Development Experience team. He’s one of the few who are working across to ensure integral deliverables. Elliot also initiated deep dive sessions to share his work with the project team, getting consensus decisions on effective technical solutions, and educating them in the process. The project leadership is grateful for Elliot’s investment in learning, contributing, and coming to lead the way on build/deploy aspects of the. His strong technical skills, high performance team behaviors, and delivered results make a profound impact on this project that will serve UT’s goal to invest and improve in our IT environment.
About the IT Excellence Award Nominees
We would also like to congratulate the other outstanding IT professionals who were nominated for this year’s IT Excellence award. Below are some excerpts from their nominations.
Carrie Bullock, Academic Information Systems:
Carrie demonstrates a deep commitment to UT Austin and its goals for retaining & matriculating students…. She has shown time and time again an ability to graciously respond to…needs while balancing federal and state financial aid rules & regulations. Quality of results is always exceptional, often going above and beyond to ensure that the current issue is resolved AND that future related downstream issues are also addressed.
Haeli Colina, Enterprise Business Information Technology Solutions:
Haeli epitomizes leadership by example. Whether learning new areas and business processes, gathering requirements for a new project, doing in-depth code analysis, leading meetings, or quickly coding new solutions, Haeli provides a great example to all who work with her of how to be a highly productive problem solver while also being a cheerful and supportive teammate. She has mastered just about every area of the Financials section of eBITS and into other external areas, grasping the big picture all the way down to the fine details, and does so with impressive speed and ease. She is never afraid to take on something new in any role that needs to be filled and is exemplary at handling emergency changes that may arise. When exploring a new area, she tends to dive in deeply to understand the problem at hand; expand her knowledge by asking questions and following potential ripple effects of the change that she is making; and volunteers for tough assignments (regularly!)
Haeli’s project management skills are legendary; one team rated Haeli’s project management as the most important factor driving that project’s ultimate success. Under her leadership, a stalled project went from barely having any code completed to being just about ready for dev testing in just a few days. She is a huge proponent of varying meeting modalities to meet the need at hand and documents thoroughly through email notes and wikis. Haeli brings fantastic attention to detail in creating exhaustive testing checklists and materials to every part of her work.
Shubhra Datta, Academic Information Services:
She’s been instrumental in my growth as a developer, and I’m sure others feel the same way.
She takes the time to understand the client’s request and then looks through my code to see if it’s the best solution. I reach out to Shubhra regularly to get insight, a better understanding, or just a different perspective on whatever I may be working on at the time.
Scott Doane, UT Libraries:
He has worked to provide his knowledge and skill to a group of developers and sys admins who were entirely new to the concepts…, accelerating [the collective effort] with his expertise and guidance in building out the Rancher Proof-of-Concept and production clusters. Scott…has provided the team with a core tool…we’ve used for capturing all of the critical decisions we’ve made along the way.
Matt Jorgenson, Enterprise Business Information Technology Solutions:
Matt has gone above and beyond to create tools and training for helping the average PyPE developer begin to use Docker for their local development. He collaborated with another member of the Next Generation Platform (NGP) team to develop the capability to use Docker for the set up and running of containers locally for application development, when the PyPE service team could not take it on due to resource constraints. Then when the opportunity arose to give a workshop to campus developers, he quickly volunteered to co-lead that workshop, attended by more than 80 people. The project leadership is grateful for Matt’s contributions and positive influence on this cross-organizational team. Matt consults on a very wide variety of architecture, technical and development experience-focused problems and solutions, making him a tremendously valuable technical contributor for the entire platform. He is an experienced, energetic, enthusiastic developer and an excellent teacher. He has a friendly, collaborative style and is adept in communicating including all forms. Matt consistently volunteers with the EBITS training program, and consistently delivers technical work at a high level, regularly being trusted with critical projects both within EBITS and the NGP.
David Muck, Academic Information Systems:
[David] pioneered the research and implementation of integrating a web application with AWS within AIS. His composure and endurance during the difficult times of the project’s life cycle was extraordinary.He has also coached and mentored the new team members like myself towards success.
Geoff Valdés, Enterprise Business Information Technology Solutions
Geoff is a brilliant, curious engineer who cares above all about the day-to-day work lives of his fellow developers. He has led in educating developers in JavaScript and CI/CD via group learning sessions and via presentations to the department…, [and] has repeatedly taken on the challenge of learning a new technology in order to analyze how best it would fit our needs.
Chris Wang, Extended Education Ventures
Our unit relies on his knowledge to make important business decisions and roadmap for the future.
He enthusiastically and patiently will stop everything to help educate and help us understand how something intricately works, so we can solve an issue, as well as cross-train other programmers.
He is our main Canvas expert…. He…consistently is a resource for ITS and the other IT Team members….
About the Rising Star Award Nominees
We would also like to congratulate the other outstanding IT professionals who were nominated for this year’s Rising Star award. Below are some excerpts from their nominations.
Victoria (Tori) Brown, ITS Campus Solutions:
Tori is recognized across [Identity and Access Management (IAM)] as a bright, smart, sharp team member with extraordinary potential. Her knowledge and advice are sought after by colleagues and customers alike. She delivers valuable solutions with a collaborative and cheerful attitude. …Tori dove in and learned many aspects of UT IAM services and has quickly became a strong contributor…Tori is a go-to person for explaining stewardship/business practices/general support for five IAM services. [She] fosters productive inter-team dialogue. She has completely reworked the IAM code repository processes and generated comprehensive documentation for new work [and] legacy systems. Tori invests time to deliver value by automating tasks and tests to ensure that processes are executed timely, and the results are accurate.
Leslie Monclova, School of Undergraduate Studies:
Leslie started training at UT just before the pandemic hit. She completed training and was 6 months into her career as a developer at EBITS when we were all told to work from home. During a time of great uncertainty, inconvenience and straight up despair, Leslie worked very successfully and independently (and remotely!) as a junior developer on a team of, dare I say, heavy hitters with high expectations. Her resilience and dedication to the University through this time is impressive. She quickly became the respected go-to person on our [University Marketing and Communications] team for several systems including a heavily used scheduling system and applications supporting research at UGS/UMAC. Clients appear very confident with Leslie’s suggestions and support. She is very conscientious when it comes to user experience and uses this as a measure of good quality software.
Aleksandra (Sasha) Sivolob, Technology Resources
Sasha has been heavily involved in the NGP effort since the beginning, and has been an invaluable resource throughout. In particular, when the opportunity arose to create a path for campus to begin using Docker even today on PyPE, Sasha volunteered to put together the tools and documentation needed. She worked closely with [a senior developer] to provide a repository of those tools and information which could become community property, benefitting all of campus. Then when the idea of providing a workshop for campus developers to learn to use Docker for local development came up, she volunteered to co-lead that workshop [, which] was a success and now dozens of developers are using Docker for local development today in advance of the new platform even being available. …I feel lucky to have her on the team.
Thank you,
Sara Gore, on behalf of the Cathy Lester IT Excellence Committee