Kyra Irene Davis and David Michael Woodward were married July 4 in Hendersonville, N.C. The Rev. Michael R. Sullivan, an Episcopal priest, officiated at Willow Falls, an events space.
Mrs. Woodward, 33, is the director for academic and government relations at Launchpad Central, a software developer in San Francisco. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and received a master’s degree in management, organizations and governance from the London School of Economics.
She is the daughter of Jacqueline Low of San Rafael, Calif., and Chesley A. Davis of Westport, Conn. The bride’s father retired as a financial analyst in the New York office of Philips, the Dutch health technology company. Her mother is the owner of Joy of Dance Ballet School, which has locations in Sausalito, Calif., and Terra Linda, Calif. The bride is also the stepdaughter of Anthony Canaleti, who owns San Francisco Renaissance, a home renovation company.
Mr. Woodward, 43, is known as Skylar. He is a software engineer at Facebook in Menlo Park, Calif. In July, he is to become the principal software engineer at Ripple, a San Francisco blockchain technology company whose software allows international financial exchanges. In 1995, he was the intern manager for the Office of Science and Technology Policy, which was overseeing the first revamp of the White House website. He graduated from Duke.
He is a son of Patricia Dawson Woodward of Kernersville, N.C., and the late John C. Woodward. The groom’s mother is a teaching assistant at Cash Elementary School in Kernersville. His father was the quality-control manager at Hanes Dye and Finishing, a textile processing company in Winston-Salem, N.C.
The couple met poolside in July of 2016 at a hotel in Palm Springs, Calif., when Mr. Woodward found himself bored of dancing with his friends at an event called Yes and Yes Yes (described as an “unconference” which allowed for three days of unconventional, informal and unscheduled discussions). He spotted Ms. Davis sitting at a table by herself, with a lightning bolt painted across her face like David Bowie.
“One of the themes of the conference was ‘just say yes to this opportunity,’” Mr. Woodward recalled, so he walked over and introduced himself. The two found much to talk about, and discovered they lived just eight blocks apart in San Francisco.
“We talked until 4 a.m. or 5 a.m. or something,” Ms. Davis said. “At the end of our first night in Palm Springs, we had started to get cuddly and he said, ‘I’m here with someone else,’ and so I said ‘I’m going to bed.’”
Though the two went on a hike together the next day, and over the course of the ensuing months saw each other somewhat regularly, Ms. Davis said, “I had kind of friend-zoned him.”
In May 2017, in a lull when neither was traveling for work and after Mr. Woodward was once again single, he began what Ms. Davis described as a “two-week campaign of you-will-be-my-girlfriend.”
“He had planned all these lovely things,” she said, including movies, a “really nice” home-cooked dinner, a night at the theater to see “Hamilton” and the introduction of her dog and his cat.
Somewhere in the middle of the romantic whirlwind, they shared a first kiss. “I just kept thinking of every opportunity,” he said. “I was really excited to see her.”
“By the end of it, I was like, I think I have a boyfriend,” she said. “He was about to go on a three-week work trip to Peru. We had this dizzying two-week romance, and then I found myself in his home, watching his cat.”
When he returned, she said, “Then we were basically inseparable.”
