Gina Trapani

Developer · Writer · Founder

👋 Hello!

I'm @ginatrapani. I build software products for fun and profit. I also like to write about how technology makes our lives better (and worse).

Currently I'm a Partner and Director of Engineering at Postlight, where we build platforms that power web sites, apps, and other digital products for our clients. Need help building something? Get in touch.

Before Postlight, I founded sites and services like Lifehacker (acquired by Univision), Makerbase (acquired by Fog Creek), and ThinkUp. My side projects include Todo.txt, an open source collection of text-based task list apps, and Narrow the Gap, a web site about the gender pay gap.

My writing has been published in The Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, and Wired, among others. Profiles of my work have appeared in venues ranging from The Wall Street Journal to The New York Times. Once upon a time, Fast Company named me one of the Most Influential Women in Technology, and Wired magazine awarded me its prestigious Rave Award.

Some nice strangers also wrote a Wikipedia page about me. To get in touch, you can send me an email to my usual username at Gmail or tweet at me.

Thanks for stopping by.

🗓 Recently

May 2018

• Spoke at F8, Facebook's annual developer conference, about partnering with The National Audubon Society to rebuild its Bird Guide App from the ground up with React Native. Panelists included representatives from Microsoft, TaskRabbit, and Condé Nast. Watch the video: How React Native Helps Companies Build Better Mobile Apps.

April 2018

• For Equal Pay Day 2018, relaunched Narrow the Gap with a new look and updated 2017 data in collaboration with my friends Matt Jacobs and Holly Graham.
• Gave a talk at Slack NYC's Developer Meetup about task estimation for developers. Published an ensuing Track Changes post, Estimation is a Core Competency.
• Interviewed Claire L. Evans about her new book, Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet, on the Track Changes podcast.
• Helped the team at Postlight launch a web site for The Great American Read, a new TV show on PBS that celebrates America's top 100 best-loved books.
• Quoted in The Wall Street Journal story America Is Drowning in Lists, a tongue-in-cheek look at todo-list culture.

March 2018

• Helped build and launch a newly redesigned site for the Digital Public Library of America.
• Co-hosted an event with The Knight Foundation at Postlight, where I moderated a panel discussing the role of platforms in encouraging unproductive dynamics between marginalized communities and journalists, with Anil Dash, Manoush Zomorodi, and Olivier Kamanda.
• Attended an International Women's Day Leadership brunch hosted by Google NYC.

February 2018

• Helped launch a new site for The Knight Foundation, featuring findings from their latest report, How Black Twitter and other social media communities interact with mainstream news. Fast Company quoted me in their story Two Charts Showing How The Mainstream Media Gets Minorities Wrong.
• Mashable quotes me in Kerry Flynn's story What's a hashtag? A digital device that both brings us together and divides us.

January 2018

• Helped build For Good, a newly-launched resource for finding socially-conscious companies.

December 2017

• Paul Ford and I interviewed Ellen Ullman, author of Life in Code, about software development in an episode of Postlight's podcast, Track Changes.

November 2017

• Compiled and published over a year's worth of work for various clients into an easily-reusable WordPress + React Starter Kit. Read the introductory post.

October 2017

• Interviewed Ellen Ullman, author of Life in Code, about her career as a software engineer at an event held at the Postlight office.
• Chatted with Jenn Schiffer, community engineer at Fog Creek's Glitch, a new platform for developers to write and remix code. Listen here.
• Quartz at Work includes me on their list of 22 Twitter accounts to follow to become a better manager.
• Quoted in a new article, Stages of motivation for contributing user-generated content: A theory and empirical test, published in the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies.
• Worked with Automattic's Longreads to launch a Membership Drive with the goal of raising $25,000 to fund new reporting and storytelling projects by mid-November. (November update: Fundraising goal met!)

September 2017

• Co-hosted an event on digital citizenship with The Obama Foundation at Postlight headquarters, where I spoke to a panel of founders, entrepreneurs, and community activists working on civic technology across New York City.

August 2017

• Transferred all the Todo.txt projects to a new community-led organization. Pull requests welcome!

July 2017

• Published How to Build for the Handoff in Track Changes.

June 2017

• Named a Partner at Postlight.
• Published my dotfiles on GitHub for reference and reuse by other programmers.

May 2017

• Helped launch a beautiful new redesign of The Village Voice's web site, which was particularly meaningful to me as a native New Yorker.

April 2017

• Appeared on the Track Changes podcast with Paul Ford talking all things Todo.txt and Paul's devotion to Emacs Org mode.

March 2017

• Appeared on a panel at Google's first-ever AMP Conf to debate whether or not AMP is good for the open web, alongside panelists from BuzzFeed, SalesForce, and Etsy. Andy Baio captured a clip.
• Published Modern JavaScript for Ancient Web Developers in Track Changes.