About Me

Resume

Lyla McBeath Fujiwara (@ceruleanotter) is a game designer and project manager living in Massachusetts. She’s had many past lives, from teaching high schoolers in East Africa to eight years in tech, where she worked as a developer for Google News and created online courses that taught hundreds of thousands of students to make their first mobile apps.

As a creator, she writes games that focus on intricate stories, complex characters, and mechanics that drive the narrative. She is a 2023 Storytelling Collective Creative Laureate and 2023 Big Bad Con POC scholar, and has freelanced for Gamehole Con, Bob World Builder, and Jeff Stevens Games.

Her own projects include Encounters in the Radiant Citadel, a 10-person D&D 5e project where she was the lead, layout artist, and writer, as well as Jukebox: A Karaoke Musical TTRPG, a karaoke-based storytelling TTRPG. Out of Luck, a 5e D&D heist set in the Radiant Citadel location of Umizu, was recently featured on a D&D Beyond Community Spotlight.

In addition to her creative work, she’s writing a substack series on TTRPG project management and is a volunteer ranger for Big Bad Con. In her off hours she can be found throwing lopsided ceramics, drawing, and cooking feasts for her cooperative house.

Android Engineer (News), Google

2020 — 2022

  • Led Android development for Google News features related to COVID response and 2020 Elections.
  • Tech lead for first major app re-design launch on a news stories-focused team. Ran and analyzed A/B tests, presented to leadership, and facilitated decision-making between 15+ stakeholders.
  • Community: Co-led sprint to write test cases, co-led Android team documentation re-vamp, started cross-team engineering study group, coordinated multiple releases of the Android app, managed two STEP interns that fully developed a feature and presented it to team leadership.

Senior Developer Advocate (Android), Google

2017 — 2020

  • Tech lead for Developing Android Apps in Kotlin Course, the basis for Google’s Android training. Wrote three lessons (93% positive rating versus 88% course average), edited hours of technical content, 40k+ enrolled students. Course projects: DiceRoller, DessertPusher, Guess It.
  • Course creator for Android Testing three lesson course and codelab series.
  • DevRel Areas​​: Architecture with Jetpack components (LiveData, ViewModel, WorkManager, Navigation), Android Testing, Android Accessibility, and Google Play Instant.
  • Team Leadership: Founded and led Android Speaker Mentorship program for Google I/O and the Android Dev Summit in 2018 and 2019, started and led two teamwide codelab “fix its”, led Android team video strategy.
  • Community Contributions: Founded DevRel Women’s Lunch, co-organized four DEI events, conducted technical interviews, mentored new team members, 28 peer bonuses.

Instructor and Course Developer, Udacity

2014 — 2017

Teacher and Camp Director (Peace Corps), Gashora Girls Academy

2011 — 2013

  • Developed curriculum and taught students C++ programming.
  • Directed computer policy and maintained all on-campus computers.
  • Built student grading and report generation pipeline in Python.
  • Led team including Girls in ICT, kLab, Carnegie Mellon University, and Peace Corps in running an ICT camp for 48 high schoolers. Read more.