Management

Instead of splitting devops and infrastructure and tests completely separate from development teams, I moved the needle so that product development teams could own more of their own infrastructure and tests, creating less back-and-forth and empowering teams to deliver.

We used Devspace, which meant any dev or team could stand up a reproducible, isolated stack with multiple services and frontends running, in the cloud, as well as modify the definitions of the infrastructure and code themselves, directly, without permission or external team tickets.

This enabled product engineers to do more experimentation and testing thru declarative infrastructure and configuration management while still protecting our production environments, unlocking their shackles and potential as the experts in the software.

At the same time I worked to reduce the outsized role our amazing DevOps team was playing in the day to day management as well as enhancement of environments, which unfairly impeded expert developers by introducing red tape and inter-team processes that didn't add value.

I ran Appen's ML Platform, which was used by FAANG and many other startups and enterprises to automate and scale their ML practices, including running both supervised and unsupervised workloads, as well as their global annotation workforce which enabled customers to leverage our crowdsourced professionals to elastically obtain labelling and quality checking services for text, voice, image, video and LIDAR annotation, training and validation use cases.

I reported to the CTO and directed multiple full stack teams each with their own tech leads and range of engineering skills to do both regular maintenance and product enhancements using technologies like Sagemaker, React, K8s (Kubernetes), Spark, Kafka, Airflow, Spring(Boot), Ruby, Python, Java, Typescript and SQL.

Maintenance included regular updates to infrastructure, bug fixes, and performance optimizations across the platform. We migrated more and more services to K8s (Kubernetes) and Ambassador as our API gateway, where we could consolidate cross-cutting logic like auth and versioning.

Enhancements included changes to simplify the UX, kill redundant or unused features, add measurement to inform our choices, and larger efforts like Enterprise OAuth.

There were 4 different websites in different technologies, acquired from different companies, and some APIs, that all needed to be unified in terms of sign up, sign in, and sign out, given their existing state of each having separate user stores, including 3rd party vendor users who logged in with vendors and then authed to us with a hidden token.

It was a stalled project, so I started with missing requirements, incomplete designs and misleading progress indicators and focused other leaders and teams on delivery thru tested working software, focusing on tested user stories and on-the-ground learnings as units of progress, instead of large, outdated PRDs waterfall style.

Contributed directly in React / Typescript, Nodejs / express, Ruby on Rails and custom gems, OAuth configuration, Java Spring with runtime loaded SPI implementations from across separate applications domains.

There was a complex architecture at play and teams that did not know each other and weren't working as a single unit, so the landscape was difficult and rife with demoralized team members.

Although my team was to play but one part in many on the project, I realized quickly that there was no single leader or coherent plan, and so there was lots of blame game and treading water.

With permission from our VP of Engineering, I took charge of the teams and worked with product to firm up requirements, and replace the initially conceived solution architecture, which would not have worked and was created in a bit of a vacuum, into one that would actually work, by digging in and running all the services and web apps myself and understanding the multiple data stores and existing auth mechanisms including auth via 3rd party vendors to some parts of the system.

I delivered the project within 5 months and for my efforts was rewarded not long after with a promotion.

My PM and the business wanted to illustrate to other teams that a fast-paced, fail-fast approach where we released daily (as opposed to 1-3 times per year) would serve us much better in that we could learn quickly, iterate and pivot, without huge costly investments into products that did not meet expectations or deadlines.

Before hiring my team, I set up a CICD pipeline and basic framework of a site that could sustain a heavy and intense crawl from google.

New hires all released to production on their first day of work - a principle I had brought to the table, that it should be so automated and simple that someone could set up and deploy a small feature within their first few hours of working at Sourceability.

Our parts and datasheets website, which also incorporated proprietary availability and quality scores, was used - within 3 months of inception - to successfully sell a 3 year Analytics API contract to an international multibillion dollar company, as well as driving organic traffic and learning how to scale to sustain google crawls of the hundreds of thousands of electronic component parts in our inventory while scaling down outside of the crawl / high-traffic moments.

• Full Stack - React, NodeJS, Typescript, Kubernetes, Gitlab
• Functional Reactive Programming - RxJS, highlandjs
• Daily Production Deploys - Canary Deployment w/ K8s
• Constant Collaboration - No “throwing over the wall”
• CI/CD Automation Pipeline - Every user story gets an instant shareable environment
• Coaching / Mentoring / Leading diverse team

A working prototype and specs for how heartpoints would be rewarded and exchanged and linked to "Proof of Good" that could be validated off-chain (since proof of good in this case may for example, be video evidence or other data that is too large to fit onto the chain), using a strategy of hashing the proof and storing the hash and URL of the proof's off-chain content.

Retirement Readiness App - Architected and built, along with more junior colleagues and product owner, a webapp whereby the user, after providing some basic demographic information, would be interviewed by one of ~10 pre-recorded actors in natural language, in order to produce a "Retirement Readiness Score", charts, and cross-sell product offerings.

Capabilities I provided included:

• A successful, performant application
• Caused the emergence of clear formulae and determinism from vague business goals
• Video captioning and screen reader for Accessbility
• Leadership of Technical + Project Team
• Clean, Organized, Testable Code and Solution Design

Spontaneous Leadership - Funny story, but our actors arrived at the studio on film day, and the director was unable to come. When it became obvious that nobody was particularly experienced or prepared to take on that role, I offered to do it, and so I collaborated with actors and the team to ensure we captured what we needed against the green screen, with proper lighting, tone and personalities the clients had asked us to obtain. I am ready to step in and lead or solve problems outside my expertise or experience, if it is what the team needs at the time.

We went through several iterations of the website, but our goals were SEO optimization and systematizing the internal booking process with salesforce while exposing certain information about entertainers, acts and availability through the website, and keeping those in sync with entertainer calendars.

With the help of some interns, I designed and built the website from the ground up, and hosted it at Cleveweb.com, the software solutions company I had formed a few years earlier.

montgranite.com - supplier of natural stone website. After assessing their products, we categorized them according to stone type, colors, texture and brand, then I created a MySQL database and an ORM to read/write PHP objects and their relationships from the database and present it as a front-end, which I designed to resemble a piece of marble.

I then hosted the company's website and email for a number of years afterward and actively updated the site on retainer.