Naomi Most

Social Systems Debugger

Some problems look like technical problems. Some look like people problems. The interesting ones are both, and the people inside them usually can't tell which is which — which is, itself, the problem.

I've spent 25 years building tools, fixing systems, and walking into situations where something is genuinely broken and the standard approaches have stopped working. Or were never working. Or were actively making things worse while everyone nodded politely in sprint reviews.

When your Agile sprints mostly produce sprained ankles, call me. When retrospectives get postponed indefinitely because "what's the point?" — also call me. When the data your lab generates is trapped behind a Windows app with no copy-paste, definitely call me.

Selected Work
Illuminate Genetic sequencing labs were generating quality metrics they couldn't actually use. Illumina's software trapped the data behind a Windows interface with no programmatic access — not even copy-paste. Someone had decided this was fine. It was not fine. I reverse-engineered their formats and built a Python library that made the data accessible. It's now in use at the CDC's bacterial sequencing lab and over 50 labs worldwide.
Streamlit Engineer #5 on what became one of the most widely used data application frameworks in the world. I rewrote the caching and media streaming engines, spearheaded the Python 3 migration, and dragged the team (lovingly) into JIRA and sprint-based continuous delivery — improving engineering predictability from 50% to 90%. I also designed and ran the Values Discovery process that gave Streamlit's leadership the words for what they were actually building. That last part turns out to matter enormously.
Sauce Labs Solved their primary ETL bottleneck — the one that had been quietly strangling the Analytics product and making big clients like KMart unreliable. Grew the engineering team from 3 to 8, innovated a new internal hiring pipeline, and architected high-fidelity near-real-time data processing on Kafka/Elasticsearch infrastructure. Left the place measurably faster and more capable than I found it.
Noisebridge In 2014, San Francisco's anarchist hackerspace was in crisis — governance had collapsed, the community was fracturing, and the city was circling. I diagnosed the failure modes, facilitated the reboot, co-created the Guilds governance model, and helped the space find its footing again. That was twelve years ago. The space is still running. Anarchy, it turns out, requires quite a lot of structure.
Metapub Searching biomedical literature and actually getting to the papers — not just the abstracts, not just the citations, but the full text linked to ontology concepts — was a mess. I built the toolkit that unified it. Researchers cite it in published papers. I consider this the highest form of flattery.
Gaeilge Quest Irish language learners had textbooks but no comprehensive, freely accessible grammar reference. I built one by hand — covering A1–B2 across four dialects — because the absence of it bothered me and apparently that's how I handle things.
Background

My grandmother, Kay McNulty, was one of the six women who programmed ENIAC in 1945 — the first general-purpose electronic computer. My grandfather, John W. Mauchly, co-invented it. Kay invented what the word "programmer" would come to mean, before the word existed. I've spent my career working in the tradition they didn't know they were starting: building systems that weren't there yet, fixing ones that had stopped working, and documenting what gets lost when nobody does.

I'm currently writing The Circuit Loom, an essay on computing, language, and what the Irish word ríomh — to weave, to compute, to narrate — tells us about all three.

How I Think About Things
Contact

Available for consulting engagements involving systems that are broken in ways that are hard to name. Also available for ones that are broken in ways that are embarrassingly easy to name but somehow nobody has said out loud yet.

naomi@nthmost.com
linkedin.com/in/nthmost

Elsewhere

This is the professional window. For where I'm actually alive and operating — projects, writing, art, hardware, community work — go to nthmost.com.

Naomi Most at Mono Lake