Coding for Grassroots Organizing
By Erik Beckwith, Lead Software Developer for Kingdom Branding
I’m Erik Beckwith, a Lead Software Developer for Kingdom Branding, a marketing firm in the Ravenswood neighborhood of Chicago. I had a unique route to my current role as a lead developer, and it’s been an enjoyable ride.
I started coding as a preteen making Dragon Ball Z websites on Angelfire. My buddy and I both had our own sites, we even had affiliates and took it pretty seriously. It wasn’t much beyond copy and pasting but I learned a lot more HTML than I realized which helped me immensely when I got back into coding almost 20 years later.
I found myself interested in complex issues and politics my second half of high school. My parent’s and I would watch Bill Maher religiously every Friday together and it started to give me a real sense of purpose because I found that I had a strength in understanding complex concepts. Those issues gave me something to focus on outside of my troubles with my peers growing up. It also gave me a sense of belonging that I hadn’t ever felt in my hometown. If it wasn’t for my passion in politics I may have never considered any serious career track.
I went to Northeastern Illinois University, an urban campus on the north side of Chicago. I wasn’t actually sure I would major in politics right away. However, at one point in my freshman year, a professor told me to do what comes easiest to you. So I went full fledged into politics. I got a Bachelors and Masters in Political Science, both from Northeastern. Getting those degrees was a huge accomplishment for me, however, they were not the only thing I needed to get a job in politics. I needed another skill. Spoiler alert, coding came into play later in my career.
I worked on multiple political campaigns starting with Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012 as a Summer Organizer. There I really broke ground and became a political person in practice. I learned all of the basics of grassroots organizing. Organizing for America, or Obama for America, as it was previously called, made a huge impact on my life. It was the first time I used data in a real world way to make a difference. I made at least 50 calls a day from an Obama phone that they gave us to use with a primitive call listing system compared to what we have now, 10 years later.
I went on to be a Campaign Manager for a Village Clerk position in 2017 after I completed my MA in Political Science. He didn’t win, but it was the first time I was completely in charge of a campaign strategy and it was a great learning experience. After that loss I went on to work on the biggest political win of my life which was working directly with one of the candidates on Chuy Garcia’s slate in 2018.
Chuy Garcia had three candidates besides himself that ran together. I was with one of the candidates every single day knocking on over 3,000 doors. Aaron Ortiz is now the State Representative for the 1st district of Illinois, and I was there for the hard boots on the ground work to see how it’s done. Not only did Aaron Ortiz beat a 27 year incumbent at the heart of the Chicago Machine, the entire slate won in a sweep. Chuy Garcia is now my congressman and the other three are still good friends. The best part of this whole story is that this is how I finally got into coding.
A few months after the 2018 win on the Southwest Side, I received a flier from Northwestern University’s Coding Bootcamp, specifically for Data Science. A few weeks after applying, Northwestern called me back and wanted to hear my story. I told them the story of Aaron Ortiz and I knocking on 3000+ doors together and they loved it. Especially the fact that I was alongside him doing data entry for all of them. It really helped me get in because most of the people in my cohort were already coders or had way more credentials than I had, even with a MA in Political Science.
I couldn’t find a job right away after my bootcamp. I was applying to be a Data Scientist when I didn’t really have the experience or credentials to be one yet. So, I worked on another campaign as a Data Specialist in Oak Park. It was the first time I got to use all of the new Python I learned in my Data Science Bootcamp. I had a lot of fun doing the data crunching and targeting. The candidate didn’t win but he got twice the amount as my last Oak Park candidate with way more people running so I still felt accomplished. However, towards the end of the campaign someone I was knocking on doors with told me, “You’re good, you need to talk to my boss”.
That first phone call with my current boss was amazing. He was the creative director for Amara Enyia, one of the candidates for Mayor of Chicago in 2019 who was endorsed by Chance the Rapper. This was incredibly exciting for me but I didn’t know what I would be getting into yet. I went in to offer data services for candidates which he passed along to one of his clients. I didn’t hear back about that, but then he asked if I could make applications. I said yes.
I started out as the first Full Stack Developer for Kingdom Branding. They had been building Wordpress websites but mostly using their no code dashboard system. So, I built the company ‘s first React-Native application that we still currently use to help clients track the status of their projects with us. I found the knowledge of both JavaScript and Python that I learned from my bootcamp extremely helpful. I could clean data and visualize it. I was a bit of a one man band for a while.
Then we received a dream project for myself as a political nerd. We got the Illinois Senate Democrats website. There I built their State Senator finder, all using JavaScript and D3, without any React. It is still currently in use and one of my biggest accomplishments in life to this point.
The Illinois Senate Democrats liked working with us so much that we got dozens of candidates around the state, and even the Democratic Party of Illinois itself. For the Democrats of Illinois I coded a quality control function by building a Python script to check for a number of things on their site including grammar errors, misspellings and bugs. I also keep viruses at bay and help fight attacks when it does happen for any of our Wordpress sites. Python makes this possible by helping to target unwanted packages or CDN’s in a very precise manner. Along with Python, I get to use a lot of JavaScript and React for these scripts.
My latest application I completed is for a client who helps advance the careers of manufacturers around the state. We now have another developer on my software team who I worked with to accomplish this project in only a few months time. It is currently in use and has had hundreds of users since its launch earlier this year. This Career Pathways in Manufacturing application was a huge accomplishment because of its complexity. The client had tons of data in a system that wouldn’t be able to connect directly to an application at the time. So, I wrote a script to collect all of the data into a Mongo Database. There are multiple sets of data and multiple ways the data crosses between each other. It is a multi-layered data system and I even got to use D3 on it as well for a visualization of the timetable chart for each of the occupations. It is a quilt of data visualization that would seem easy to an untrained eye but it was a huge accomplishment for a team of two people. We would not have been able to accomplish the application if I didn’t have a Certificate in Data Science from Northwestern, especially just the two of us and especially so quickly.
That’s my story so far, we are still building React Web Applications and React Native Applications for clients today. I love my job because I get to learn something new almost every day and I am working with clients and projects I couldn’t have dreamed of, like my Illinois Senate Democrats Senator Finder. My young political soul is very fulfilled today and I am extremely proud of the work I do and the projects I get an opportunity to work on.
Tips for Young Coders
- Don’t try to memorize everything, determine a good process of learning and things will become part of your memory over time.
- If you hit a wall on an issue, go for a walk or take at least a 10–15 minute breather in some way to recollect your thoughts. You will get it but not when you are worn out or frustrated.
- Almost everyone gets imposter syndrome sometimes, so if you ever feel like you aren’t really a coder because of this or that or you just don’t feel like you belong, you do. We all can feel like an imposter at times, especially when something we are tasked with isn’t going our way. So just power through and you will see that feeling fade away, but some people feel it throughout their career so don’t feel bad if it doesn’t. Sometimes that feeling is just what makes us work even harder.
I hope my experience can help others see the light at the end of the tunnel, because I know it isn’t always easy but keep pushing for your dreams and you can get there.
My Core Programming Tools:
- Python
- JavaScript
- React
- React-Native
- D3
- MongoDB
