Actionscript

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 (sidenote: a code-oriented framework, FlashQuoting, which did away with REF2's markup and code bindings, superceded REF2 before all 50 states were rolled out.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.

Having shown in Quoting (F3) and REF 2.0 (UI Framework) that tests and low complexity policies led to fewer bugs and higher velocity by doing some a/b studies, the business invested in tooling to automatically measure and enforce policies across the Direct Quoting line of business software development teams.

These teams used a variety of software stacks and technologies, including proprietary build and release systems.

I consulted with the build and release team, at the time, a separate team, to understand their plugin architecture which already was in use for all said teams.

Next, I worked with each team to understand their level of code coverage across different types of tests (unit, integration, end to end), and agree with them what targets they wanted to meet, and at what point in time.

Some teams required me to implement coverage measurement tools. Keep in mind that we were not able to use open source tech, and actionscript had no unit testing or code coverage tools.

I worked with a mentor of mine to write a lexer-parser-generator, which took the grammar for the actionscript language and allowed us to instrument our codebase with a pre-build step that inserted beacon calls with metadata into the various methods of the application. The coverage monitor and unit test UI was written in C#.

I exposed the coverage reporting service using web services running on SOAP via MS ASP.net WCF communications stack. Initially an MS SQL database housed the data, but as it grew, we moved it to a data cube where various dimensional summary and BI queries could be more efficiently run without interfering with the transactional nature of concurrent builds reporting their metrics in across the business.

Built upon existing code analysis and instrumentation tools to create a cross-platform solution for the build-time analysis of unit and system test code coverage, cyclomatic complexity, code coupling, defect density, change volume, maintainability, and other quality metrics. Data from many different proprietary formats is transformed into a single canonical format, where it is in turn normalized into a relational structure to facilitate on demand querying for system-level quality benchmarking, real-time code quality reporting, providing objective insight into QA risk assessments / test strategies, and enforcement of architectural standards and constraints.

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)

Cancels was Progressive's first attempt at enabling policy cancellation without making a call to the call center and talking to a human.

The business wanted to find out key information that would aid them in avoiding cancellations in the future, as well as to provide off-ramps to cancellation that users might find enticing.

I worked with the business to understand the requirements, which allowed the user to navigate back and forth, answering questions that implicated which other questions were relevant, including questions in the future flows that the user may have already navigated through.

The UI was accordion-like, with eased animations, lighting, visual progress indicators and complex business logic that varied due to state-level regulation variance in the insurance industry.

I completed the application and it was delivered to production where we got a higher rate of cancellation data for scientists than we were capturing in our call centers. This helped us better understand the motivators for cancellation.

The success on this project is what got me brought in to help lead a much more significant effort - a brand new auto insurance policy quoting system for all 50 states - as a full-time employee

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.

I built a plain web and interactive flash based website for mpercent.com, an art gallery, backed by a php web server and mysql database, containing various works of art, artists and events that were being presented and searchable to end users

Working with executives, I designed, built, hosted, continuously updated, and reported traffic analysis reports for Northcoast Technologies. I designed and built an animated advertisement explaining their product.

Rick Smith Jr. was one of my best customers, we did 3 different versions of the website over an 8 year span. They included advanced animations and rich video experiences as well as booking forms and SEO optimizations.

Thetaylorcompanies.com had a searchable cataolgue of many pieces of furniture, each with multiple image angles, specs, descriptions, brands, pricing, and delivery schedules. After understanding their needs, I put together a MySQL database, PHP web server with a custom ORM, and an rich frontend with an animated intro page.