Hi, I'm Allison Browne 👋

Welcome to my README! Here's a bit about who I am, how I got here, and how to work with me effectively.

What I Do

I'm a Senior Backend Engineer on the Database Frameworks Team at GitLab. Before this role, I spent over five years on the CI (Verify) team and a year in the Monitor Stage, where I worked on application health monitoring and metrics features.

My Background

My path to software engineering was anything but linear.

I grew up in Southeastern Massachusetts and spent most of my life in and around Boston before relocating to Buffalo, NY a few years ago. As a kid I was already tinkering with technology, earning my A+ certification in school and writing command-line games in QBasic.

Despite that early interest, I started college in chemistry before graduating with a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from Northeastern University. I went on to spend several years doing luxury residential architectural design on Nantucket Island, where the technical problem-solving side of the work is what I loved most.

That technical pull eventually led me to build and design websites for employers and develop automation and parameterized automation for drafting software — and I was teaching myself Ruby on the side. Eventually, I made the full leap into software engineering.

Since then I've worked across a range of domains:

• AdTech — custom reporting, analytics, and data pipelines processing 8.2 trillion mobile events, ruby based
• Clean Energy — utility and home energy audit data at EnergySavvy, python based
• EdTech — assessment tooling at Pluralsight, python based
• DevOps/Platform — CI infrastructure and database frameworks at GitLab, ruby based

I have over 10+ years of professional experience in software engineering

How I Work

I'm async-first and typically online between 8:30 AM – 4:30 PM EST, with some flexibility depending on the day.

My general rhythm:

• Mornings — code reviews, async replies, and working through my TODO list
• Afternoons — focused project work and coding

Need something from me? Async (issues, MRs, comments) works great for most things. If something is urgent or involves significant scope or design changes to what I'm currently working on, ping me directly on Slack. I'm always happy to chat sync as well!