UI Framework Dev

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

The Quoting (F3) was a success, but to roll out to all 50 states, we needed an engine that could handle the complexity of the system, render quickly, and that was easier for our engineers to build and test with.

I took the most complex page of the Direct Auto Quoting app - the "Buy Page" - and drastically improved performance, reducing render time from 28 seconds to 2, by isolating the page and building it with a prototype of what would become REF2.

Seeing such a drastic improvement in performance gave the business the confidence they needed to convert Quoting (F3) to REF2 and use it to roll out to the remaining states. (sidenote: a code-oriented framework, FlashQuoting, which did away with REF2's markup and code bindings, superceded REF2 before all 50 states were rolled out. The later popularity of and similarities with React confirmed REF2 was onto something.)

Technical Details REF2 targeted both Flash and HTML during the pre-webkit era. Created technology-independent language and APIs for describing UI hierarchies, cascading styles, business logic and arbitrary data structures in a way that abstracted the developer away from the details of the client/server event communications, marshalling between multiple client technologies, persistence of state concerns, or the details of rendering engines / APIs in the various supported environments. Aided in development of dev tools such as code hinting and code generation to facilitate quick onboarding, compile time checks, type safety and debugging.

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.