From time to time we will profile members of the Give Lively team, revealing more about who we are, what we do and how we fit into a mix of dedicated and dynamic engineers, creatives, strategists and advocates helping nonprofits do more with digital fundraising tools.

Like the person who is the focus of this week’s profile, the full Give Lively team is passionate about using tech for social good and providing a better fundraising experience to nonprofits and donors.

Sam Auciello

What do you do at Give Lively?

I’m a software engineer. Our team builds new features for the Give Lively fundraising platform and fixes issues with the existing features. My work touches virtually every aspect of our platform but I’ve spent a lot of time working on our data reporting systems.

What does a day in your life at Give Lively look like?

My work varies a lot from day to day. Most of it centers around changes to our code base. Some changes are simple and some more complex. One day I might make two or three small changes and another I might be working on a single larger change that could take as long as a week to finish. We do a lot of programming in pairs on our team. This helps us avoid mistakes and share knowledge within the team about different parts of our code base and different projects that we are working on. Regardless of whether we do pair programming, every change needs to be reviewed by another member of the team. Once it has been approved, it gets sent to our quality assurance team to triple check that we haven’t made any mistakes before it gets deployed.

What do you like to do outside of Give Lively?

I enjoy dancing, playing piano, guitar and ukulele. Recently I’ve been playing a Viking-themed video game called Valheim. Also for the past year and a half I have been working on building a house in Maine where I live.

What excites you about Give Lively?

I love the opportunity to work on software that really helps people who are doing good in the world. Too often it feels like software is used to help rich people get richer. Give Lively has enabled me to work on software that helps people with altruistic goals. That makes going to work each day feel far more rewarding for me.