Adam Schwartz

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
—Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

Education

(BA) 2014 - 2018: Earlham College, Richmond, IN

  • Major: Computer Science
  • Minor: Philosophy
  • GPA: 3.78
  • College Honors
  • Awards
    • 2018: Wendell M. Stanley Senior Scholar-Athlete Award
    • 2015, 2017: All-HCAC Sportsmanship Award, Heartland College Athletic Conference, Division III Men’s Tennis
    • 2013: Earlham Dean’s Scholarship

Experience

September 2022 - Present: Technologist, CVP, Washington, DC

  • Engineering Lead for the Refugee and Asylum directorate of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).
  • Supported 80 engineers working across the full life cycle of asylum and refugee case management.
  • Primary technologies: Ruby, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes

May 2018 - August 2021: Software Engineer, Diagnotes, Inc., Indianapolis, IN

  • Helped launch the next generation of Diagnotes’ secure messaging and telehealth platform.
  • Primary Technologies: Go, JS, Ruby, PostgreSQL, Docker, AWS

May 2017 - August 2017: Software Engineer, Healthx, Indianapolis, IN

  • Summer internship with Indianapolis TechPoint Xtern program, https://techpoint.org/xtern/
  • Developed client libraries for customers to integrate with the Healthx platform.
  • Primary technologies: Java, C#, Ruby, Python, JS, OpenAPI

August 2016 - January 2017: Computer Science Department Student Representative, Earlham College

  • Participated in weekly faculty meetings to address concerns, ideas, and questions from fellow students.

May 2016 - August 2016: Full Stack Web Developer, Adopt-A-Pet.com, Richmond, IN

2015 - 2018: System Administrator, Earlham College Cluster Computing Group (CGG)

  • Managed high performance compute clusters (HPC) that support student work and faculty research across various departments including: Biology, Chemistry, Physics, and Computer Science.
  • https://cs.earlham.edu/applied-groups/CCG.php
  • Primary Technologies: Linux, RHEL, CentOS, Xen, Torque PBS, InfiniBand, 10GbE

2015 - 2018: Helping Others Program (HOP), Earlham College

December 2015: Web Design Volunteer Instructor, Tibetan Career Center, McLeod Ganj, India

  • Organized and lead a one-week web design course on HTML5 technologies and web hosting.

March 2014 - April 2014: Web Design Intern, Glantz Design, Evanston, IL

  • High school internship (Senior Project)
  • Worked with graphic design major from Northwestern University
  • Created a new website for a local elementary school, http://orringtonpta.org/
  • Primary technologies: WordPress

Talks / Conferences

October 22, 2024: Your first AI-Assisted Pull Request for Good, GOTO Chicago

  • Assisted in a two-hour workshop guiding participants through contributing to a Ruby for Good project using GitHub Copilot. Workshop lead by Sean Marcia.

June 18. 2020: Why Emacs?, Dotfiles-Indy

  • What’s the deal with Emacs? I thought Vim was better anyway? Why should I switch from Visual Studio Code? Emacs is weird. Let’s take a look at what makes Emacs unique and highlight how it has inspired the software we use everyday.

June 16, 2020: Using build tags in Go, Golang Indianapolis

  • When it comes to compiling your programs, Go has a few tricks up its sleeve. Build tags are a versatile tool that provide a means to conditionally compile files into your Go program. In this talk we will write a make-believe serverless function that uses build tags to substitute package main so that we can develop and debug our program locally, while still being able to deploy a “pure” production binary. As a bonus, we will look at setting package variables using the ldflags -X option (see go doc cmd/link).

April 16, 2020: Keep it Simple Dotfiles, Dotfiles-Indy

  • How I manage my dotfiles without any symlinks using a “bare” git repository.

January 8, 2020: Emacs and the Joy of Text Editing, Indy.rb

  • Let’s explore text editing as a tool for thought as we examine the way of EMACS. This talk covers the history of text editors as well as what sets them apart from commercial software and IDEs.

October 23, 2019: Using Go Modules “replace”, Golang Indianapolis

  • Go modules give us new ways to manage the dependencies in our own apps and packages. This talk explores how to substitute package versions or branches on the fly using replace, exclude, and go get.

August 21, 2019: Lightning Talk: Using “go present”, Golang Indianapolis

  • present is a neat tool that offers some unique features for giving talks about code. This talk covers how to embed images, websites, and live source code into your presentation as well as address some of the trade-offs you have to make when choosing present over traditional slide-making software.

July 10, 2018: Don’t Forget To Have Fun, IndyPy

  • It’s easy to get lost and overwhelmed with software development and start to lose interest or motivation when working on projects. I’ve found it helpful to mix things up and remember to spend time on things you enjoy. This talk shares some of the ways I have been managing my happiness and how it’s impacted my work.

More at: https://github.com/anschwa/talks

Last updated: 2025-08-29