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Sonia Cook-Broen, Software Engineer & Founder

Fulbright Specialist, Computer Science

Software Engineer & Founder · Transmedia artist

Sonia Cook-Broen

Open to new projects and collaborations
  • Full-stack
  • AI systems
  • IIIF & provenance
  • Prototyping
  • Standards & interoperability

Founder of TheTechMargin, a design, app, and strategy studio for digital humanities, media, and the arts. I build bridges for scholars, archives, photojournalists, and artists.

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The main site. All subdomains feed into one chronological stream.

Years shipping
12 + 3Twelve in corporate and startups, three as founder of TheTechMargin
Collections in one search
5Smithsonian, the Met, Europeana, NASA, Earth Engine, by subject not institution
YouTube subscribers
109Kplus 7,500 weekly newsletter readers
Studio builds
21Platforms, research tools, and installations on portfolio.thetechmargin.com

01 · About

Who I am

I'm a software engineer with a designer's eye and process. Twelve years in corporate and startup engineering — developer relations, forward-deployed engineering, and lead and individual-contributor roles across healthcare, legal tech, cybersecurity, and enterprise platforms — and three years as founder of TheTechMargin taught me how systems encode assumptions, and how to intervene at the root rather than the surface. That synthesis is what lets me take an abstract, nonlinear idea and turn it into something buildable.

My practice investigates how we construct reality from fragments — through paint, pixels, sound, or language. Working across code as art, immersive applications, interactive installation, video, and music, I build tools and artworks that bridge human perception with machine intelligence. As founder of TheTechMargin, a design, app, and strategy studio, I build bridges for scholars, archives, photojournalists, and artists, and teach computational creativity with a focus on women and youth in STEM.

I've shipped in healthcare, legal tech, cybersecurity, financial services, and enterprise platforms. I now work mostly with museums, archives, photographers, and scholars.

Talks

  • Dreamforce '22 — Scalable Cloud Architectures
  • TrailheadDX '22 — Lightning Web Components

Teaching

  • Women in AI Workshops, 2024–25
  • AI & Creativity for Youth, 2024–25
  • Scratch Coding in Maine public schools, 2023
  • Mentor: Trailblazer Community Guide, Generation Australia, Middle School STEM Capstone

Writing, exhibitions & press

  • TheTechMargin newsletter, 2022–present, 7,500 weekly readers
  • Co-author, orientation and directionality in psychedelic experience — UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics, under review
  • Synth-tember 2026, New Alliance Gallery — Memory<>Machine
  • Ways of Seeing, three-channel video installation — 110,000+ viewers
  • TheTechMargin Music on Spotify — electronic composition and generative audio
  • Press: Portland Phoenix, Mobile Press-Register, MaineBiz

02 · Experience

Where I've worked

  1. 2023 — Present

    Founder

    TheTechMargin

    Design, app, and strategy studio for artists, researchers, and educators

    TheTechMargin is the synthesis of my technical and creative practice. I build AI-powered tools for artists, cultural researchers, and educators, and produce the newsletter and YouTube channel. As an FDE engaging with clients, my work bridges the gap between idea and implementation — design and prototyping through to a production-ready solution.

    • Four Corners provenance platform and protocol
    • Collection Explorer and Dante Explorer
    • Women in AI workshops

    Next.js · Python · RAG · Vector DBs · IIIF · GCP

  2. 2024 — Present

    Co-Founder & CTO

    AICharmLab

    AI tools for creative professionals

    A platform for artists building sustainable creative practices. I designed it from more than fifty hours of practitioner interviews I conducted myself, so the interface respects how artists actually work instead of asking them to become engineers. Seed funded.

    • 50+ hours of practitioner interviews
    • Seed-funded product
    • Interfaces for non-technical users

    Next.js · React · Supabase · AI tooling

  3. 2021 — 2023

    Senior Manager, Technical Ecosystem Enablement

    Salesforce

    Global partner enablement and developer relations

    On the global partner enablement team I built prototypes with technology not yet ready for customers and demonstrated them to partners like PwC and Deloitte. I designed and hosted workshops, mentored developers in the Asia-Pacific region through Generation Australia, and spoke at Dreamforce and TrailheadDX on scalable cloud architecture and Lightning Web Components.

    • Dreamforce '22 and TrailheadDX '22 speaker
    • PwC and Deloitte technical workshops
    • Generation Australia mentor

    Apex · Lightning · Heroku · MuleSoft · Einstein AI

  4. 2019 — 2021

    Lead Salesforce Developer

    CrowdStrike

    Customer-facing security portal

    I led the rebuild of the Customer Community Portal on Lightning Web Components after a first attempt had failed, and built a bi-directional Zoom/Salesforce integration for webinar campaigns. I set up the team's Git workflows and version-control standards and mentored on frontend practice.

    • Customer Community Portal rebuild
    • Zoom/Salesforce API integration
    • Git workflows and code standards

    LWC · JavaScript · Salesforce · GitHub · REST APIs

  5. 2018 — 2019

    Lead Software Engineer

    Litify

    Legal SaaS platform

    I directed the Core Product Engineering team during the platform's foundational growth, making the frontend architecture decisions and owning design sign-off. I built the CI/CD pipeline on SFDX, scratch orgs, and CircleCI so every change was tested and deployed without manual steps, and kept the bar high through code review and documentation.

    • Core Product Engineering lead
    • SFDX and CircleCI pipeline
    • Frontend architecture and design sign-off

    Salesforce · SFDX · CircleCI · JavaScript

  6. 2016 — 2018

    Senior Application Developer

    IDEXX

    Global veterinary diagnostics platform

    I led frontend development for a global Salesforce implementation, building tools for online ordering and lab-result visualization. I moved the team from desktop-first to mobile-driven design and responsive UX standards on the Lightning Design System.

    • Lab-result visualization tools
    • Desktop-to-mobile transition
    • Global Salesforce implementation

    JavaScript · D3.js · Salesforce · SAP integration

  7. 2013 — 2015

    Software Engineer

    WEX

    Fleet and payments technology

    I built interactive dashboards in d3.js and Node.js to analyze code coverage and network diagrams, and a custom CMS with a graphical UI for templating online credit applications, which cut release cycles from two weeks to a few hours. I also delivered a mobile app for the international sales team.

    • Release cycles from two weeks to hours
    • Custom CMS with graphical templating
    • d3.js dashboards

    Node.js · d3.js · jQuery · Salesforce · Apex

03 · Projects

What I've built

Platforms & research tools

Collection Explorer

Cultural heritage research tool

2025 – present

I federate IIIF collections from the Smithsonian, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Europeana, NASA, and Earth Engine into one surface. Browsing runs on a Latin thematic ontology — Aqua, Terra, Flora, Lux, Corpus, Materia — so a search proceeds by subject rather than by collection. Semantic search, computer-vision color-palette extraction, and deep-zoom viewing, with each object's complete manifest shareable by link: the interoperability record travelling with the object rather than staying behind at the institution.

Sources
Smithsonian, Met, Europeana, NASA, Earth Engine
Ontology
36 thematic categories
Standard
IIIF Image + Presentation 3.0
  • IIIF
  • Semantic search
  • Computer vision
  • Next.js
  • TypeScript

Four Corners

Image provenance and authorship platform

2025 – present

Realizing Fred Ritchin's Four Corners paradigm: binding context, sources, backstory, and authorship to the photographic image. Built with Fred Ritchin (International Center of Photography) and photojournalist Alexey Yurenev; founding partner Writing With Light. In progress: a project with photojournalist Brian Palmer tracing Frederick Douglass through a lineage of moral courage, anchored to America-250.

Partners
Fred Ritchin, Alexey Yurenev, Writing With Light
Output
IIIF Presentation 3.0 manifests
Recognition
Basis for the Fulbright Specialist selection
  • IIIF
  • Provenance
  • Metadata
  • Photography
  • Next.js

Dante Explorer

Computational humanities research platform

2024 – present

A retrieval-augmented platform mapping the Divine Comedy through spatial navigation, cross-referenced annotation, and interactive 3D literary visualization, with search across five centuries of scholarship. With Arielle Saiber.

Collaborator
Arielle Saiber
Corpus
Five centuries of scholarship
Method
RAG + 3D visualization
  • RAG
  • 3D visualization
  • Python
  • Next.js

Orientation Explorer

Visualizing directionality in psychedelic experience

2025 – present

Built for the research paper of the same subject. Roughly 40,000 experience reports from the Erowid Experience Vault yield 21,591 orientation passages across thirty substances; language-model extraction and semantic embedding, HDBSCAN with Ward-linkage clustering, resolved into a sixteen-category taxonomy the visualization makes navigable. I built it in D3.js and p5.js and am a co-author on the paper.

Corpus
21,591 passages, 30 substances
Taxonomy
16 categories
Paper
UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics
  • D3.js
  • p5.js
  • Embeddings
  • HDBSCAN
  • Python

AI Charm Lab

AI tools for creative professionals

2024 – present

A platform for artists building sustainable creative practices, designed from more than fifty hours of practitioner interviews I conducted. The interface is built for people who aren't engineers and respects the expertise they already have. Seed funded.

Research
50+ hours of interviews
Status
Seed funded
Role
Co-founder & CTO
  • Next.js
  • Supabase
  • AI tooling
  • Human-centered design

Installations & media

Ways of Seeing

Three-channel video installation

2023 – present

AI-mediated video poetry exploring perception and translation. Custom LoRA models trained on my own paintings drive a poetry-to-animation pipeline. 110,000+ viewers.

Reach
110,000+ viewers
Models
Custom LoRA on my paintings
Format
Three-channel installation
  • LoRA
  • Video pipelines
  • Poetry-to-animation

04 · Skills

What I work with

Engineering

  • TypeScript / JavaScript
  • React / Next.js
  • Node.js
  • Python
  • PostgreSQL / SQL
  • GCP
  • CI/CD: SFDX, CircleCI, GitHub Actions
  • Salesforce Lightning / LWC

AI systems

  • RAG and vector databases
  • Semantic search and embeddings
  • Custom LoRA and GAN training
  • Video-generation pipelines
  • Model-agnostic integrations
  • Interfaces for non-technical users

Standards & open infrastructure

  • IIIF Image and Presentation 3.0
  • SPARQL and Linked Open Data
  • Content-addressed storage
  • Design-token theming
  • Accessibility testing

Creative practice

  • Code as art
  • Immersive applications
  • Interactive installation
  • Video and WebGL
  • Music, generative audio, and Web Audio API
  • Adobe Creative Cloud

Teaching & enablement

  • Developer relations
  • Workshop design
  • Conference talks
  • Technical video and writing
  • Mentorship

05 · Contact

Work with me

I take client work through TheTechMargin: prototyping, provenance and digital-humanities infrastructure, and AI systems built for people who aren't engineers. I'm also open to academic collaborations, residencies, and Fulbright Specialist placements. Email is best.

sonia@thetechmargin.com