XP

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.

Consulted and advised Enterprise Steering Committee on adoption of Agile processes within the broader SDLC, which was being standardized away from waterfall.

Conceived of, designed, prototyped, developed, tested and rolled out various solutions for improved modelling and automation of several development-related business processes, spanning the software development lifecycle from requirements to system retirement. Created bidirectional traceability between requirements, code, test, and defect data and metadata from various disparate systems and technologies including Quality Center, Sharepoint, Visual Studio and TFS using REST, JavaScript, .NET and WCF services and an Enterprise Service Bus model.

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.

Progressive had two sites for Direct Auto Quoting - one used by customers at home and the other used by our call-center reps. Given the complex state-by-state variance in the insurance laws, this made for a huge maintenance cost, and doing it twice in two codebases didn't make sense.

The premise was that a single web 2.0 Direct Quoting Application could replace these while also yielding a much more modern and customer-delighting application.

As the team's Actionscript expert, I joined and quickly helped out delivering feature after feature, and I loved the XP discipline and grew to appreciate TDD especially after the site started hitting performance problems that warranted significant refactors, which would have been much riskier without test coverage!

Our pilot included 14 of the 50 states, and was a complete success. However, the amount of clientside rules and assets started slowing the app down, and this was when I was asked to replace the REF framework that preceded my joining, with something much faster and more developer friendly. This led to my promotion to lead engineer, where I begun work on REF 2.0 (UI Framework)