August Memo
[a memo written towards the Nieux Society on August 29th]
I’m writing a longer intro post here to properly introduce myself since I’m a minted member but have only attended a few events so far. My name is Simone Ballard and I’m a Tulane alumna from 2015. I studied environmental science and lived in Austin, Texas immediately after graduation working for two environmental NGO’s and as a barista downtown. I became interested in water management related topics then, and moved to Amsterdam to attend grad school at VU University in their multidisciplinary environmental program the next year. I focused on international water management (including coastal flood management techniques both policy & technology) during my thesis — largely inspired by the infrastructure issues I had seen in New Orleans post-Katrina.
After grad school, I stayed in the Netherlands on a skilled worker visa and worked largely in communications and market research for water companies and sustainability initiatives. I worked a few large international conferences and started my own small company there in order to consult for larger organizations. After backpacking for six months in 2019 and working remotely for a science paper editing company, I moved back to the U.S. with the intention of continuing to consult for environmental companies, which I successfully did for about six months. Then fate struck again and I was patient zero for a really bad case of COVID-19 at the end of March 2020. The disease made me so tired that I could only really work part-time during the day.
I dropped all my clients by July 2020 and enrolled in a software coding bootcamp — now called BloomTech — that teaches Fullstack Web Development. I stayed in this bootcamp for 10 months and did my best to try and absorb as many facets of application development as I could. Last summer I did an internship with an NFT start-up in the UK working primarily in Vue.js and the Clarity smart contract language. Web3 and Blockchain is what got me into software development as the technology itself seemed to target a lot of transparency issues and be a solution towards a more even playing field.
I travelled a little more at the end of last year and beginning of this year including returning to Europe for the first time since the pandemic began. I closed my company and more or less wrapped up affairs over there, looking towards starting a new phase back home in the states. Even though there are many attractive cities to live in, after spending nearly the whole pandemic very isolated in Wyoming, my mind kept wandering back to New Orleans, not only because of college memories, but because of how authentic the city remains and how focused it is on resilience and boutique projects of impact.
I have just now wrapped up a software apprenticeship this summer with Revelry Labs working on Elixir/Phoenix applications and am looking for my next opportunity in the software / web3 / crypto field. I would like to offer my unique perspective (whether or not I stay in the area long-term) and happy to make connections across my network for you and your project as well. My contact info is below and otherwise I look forward to meeting more of you at the happy hours and other events this next month. Feel free to reach out whenever!
Simone
