Chelsea Kelly-Reif

Writing

Notes from the work: what I built, what the evidence supports, and what still needs a person to decide.

Series

Public data and evidence

What public records actually say, what they leave out, and how to read them without mistaking a missing value for a fact.

  • A blank is not a bad score

    As of September 18, 2026, the federal training scorecard shows no completion, employment, or earnings figure for 1,209 of California's 3,266 programs. A blank is not a bad score, and Workforce Pell's interim placement test borrows the same measure.

  • A missing answer is not a no

    In the Medicaid unwinding, most people who lost coverage were never determined ineligible. Their case just did not hear back, and the system recorded that the same way it records a no.

  • There is no value the system treats as true

    The federal government has cut Medicaid funding for transgender children's care, running the exclusion through data systems I spent years helping build. The field that records who we are is one character wide, and it was never fixed.

  • The score was the easy part

    I built GTFS Scorecard to turn transit-data findings into repairs. It taught me that civic technology earns trust through explicit judgment, honest unknowns, preserved evidence, and proof that a change reached the source.

  • A signed transit order starts the story

    A practical way to read California transit policy through exact instructions, named agencies, inferred dependencies, and public evidence.

Series

Leading engineering

Managing managers, staying close to the architecture, and leading a team while your own life keeps running.

  • Staying close without becoming the bottleneck

    I moved from principal engineer to managing managers without wanting to leave the architecture behind. The harder lesson was how to stay accountable without making myself the route every important decision had to travel.

  • There was no maintenance window for becoming myself

    I transitioned while my life and the public systems around me kept running. That experience shaped how I modernize technology and lead people through change without abandoning them.

Series

Accountable technology

Who a system answers to, what a pivot can and cannot launder, and where responsibility stays with a person.

Series

Access by design

Accessibility, language, and privacy as engineering practice, not a final audit.