My path to software development was long and twisty. When I was in junior high, an inspired teacher at my school pushed to offer some introductory courses on programming. I was the only girl in the class. It was so fun, and I was so bummed when the second course wasn't offered due to lack of interest. 'But I was interested!' I thought. And then I continued on in the rest of my classes and promptly forgot about coding.
I'd forgotten that I'd even taken a coding class until after I'd completed my degree in History, intending to become a lawyer. My wife was finishing her last year of college and I'd taken a job at a small tech company to cover our expenses since we had no support systems and were financing our own degrees. I'd been talking with different lawyers in different fields, and none of them were happy with their careers. At the same time, my wife was learning to code, and I was working at a company that built reporting software. I had already been acting as an editor and then a technical writer for my company, and one day I had a flashback to my little coding class. I started trying some of my wife's Python homework problems, and it was fun. One of my coworkers sat me down and pointed out to me that if I was able to be a technical writer already, and able to understand our software, and help train others, that "you get this". Since it was a small company, they were ready for anyone who wanted to take on extra work, and there was an open position for a Support Engineer. The company president offered that if I could teach myself enough Python in the next 6 weeks (in my personal time) to write a script that would call and run one of our sample reports (including connections to datasources) from the command line, I'd know enough to land that Support Engineer role.
Homework problems were nothing like this. I had to learn about cloud-based datasources and databases, figure out how to pass arguments (and figure out what those thingies were even called!) from the command line to the script, how to structure and pass in file paths, and so much more. But the best thing I learned was how to find information, read technical documentation, and teach myself brand new things that I'd never tried (or thought about) before. This has served me in all my roles since. By the way, I got the job.
After working in the support role for a few months, I realized that I didn't just want to troubleshoot features and help others to use our tools, I wanted in on that creative process. I wanted to help build things that helped people. My wife had just landed a great job at a remote-sensing company and so I quit to do a Rails Bootcamp (that had been recommended by one of our gainfully employed friends who had recently attended). I caught that coding bug and never looked back. And now in addition to all the other creative hobbies I have -- baking from scratch, designing and sewing my own patterns, making music, gardening (plus desiging and building my own irrigation systems), building functional things (out of wool, paper, cardboard, wood, metal), I get to spend my work-life building things too!
Go (Golang), Temporal.io, Ruby/Rails, CircleCI, Docker, Postgresql, Git, Github
JavaScript/TypeScript, Kubernetes, Istio, AWS (DynamoDB, EC2, S3, CloudWatch), DynamoDB, SQL Server 2008, Bitbucket
Team: Order Operations Platform
Stack: Golang + Temporal, Ruby/Rails | Postgresql
- Roles: Software Engineer II 10/21-04/23, Software Engineer III 04/23-04/24, Lead Engineer 4/24-Present
- Maintained and contributed to back end applications for managing orders (from capture to shipping)
- Led multiple projects from research and design to ticketing and implementation (teams of 2-6)
- 'Future Inventory' for Exchanges. Researched and collaborated across 5 teams to capture items being returned and enable those items to be immediately reserved by other customers. Increased revenue by $8-9M
- Redesign order cancellation & refunds to be resilient, consolidating from distributed systems into an Order Platform; reducing intervention from customer support
- Enable Transportation apps to to capture and broadcast estimated arrival dates for select carriers ('smoothest' cross team project he'd ever ben part of in 7 years). API based plus db-triggers
- Enable order history apps to capture and serve prepared_at and accepted_at timestamps to enable better client-facing info on UI, and enable new chatbots to provide answers to cdommon questions. (out of order updates, message-based,
- Implement re-fix (describe in terms of backorder or shortship)
- Discovery of long term bug + fix decreasing errors from 2 endpoints by 80 and 90 %.
Team: Legislative Council Staff (Non-Partisan Research group), IT
Stack: Ruby On Rails, PostgreSQL | SQL Server 2008, SQL Server Reporting Services
- Sole developer (after 3 months) for new Rails application to replace MS Access system for state budget analysis
- Refactored and reorganized code to adhere to Rails conventions; added RSpec test suite, Rubocop
- Designed database and features, wrote user stories based on customer meetings
- Researched/documented systems of SQL Server Reporting & automated jobs established by previous employee
- Developed and updated customized SQL Server 2008 reports for Congress and staff
Team: R&D Kubernetes application for SREs
Stack: Go backend, DynamoDB, Prometheus/Cortex, Typescript/React/Redux UI, via AWS-hosted Kubernetes.
- Constructed back-end micro services for SaaS platform, contributed blogs
- User-facing APIs and Istio-Vet Tool expose useful data about users’ Kubernetes and Istio resources
- Parsed and restructured data from internal APIs to display in React components.
- Ensured code accuracy through unit testing and integration testing
- Initiated brand new integration tests using Ginkgo/Gomega for local testing and CICD pipeline:
- Suite creates new K8s cluster, installs tools & manifests, hits API endpoints, verifies response body elements
- 7/2017 - 6/2018: HTML/CSS, Javascript and jQuery, Ruby & Rails, React
- 7/2016 - 6/2017: continued with Python, learned basic JSON, XML, SQL
- 98.5% customer satisfaction rating as sole Support Engineer (domestic & international)
- Customer-facing documentation, 50+ help articles
- Revised Bug Ticket Life Cycle SOP to increase efficiency across 3 teams.
- Zendesk touches reduced: Personal(30%), Development (61%), QA (96%)
- Provided feedback & suggestions for new software features
- Supported the Executive team with administrative duties
- Produced list of 80 articles needing revision based on customer footprints
- Devised roadmap & tutorial pages for new customers which became part of Top-20 most-viewed across 500+ articles
- Supported teams of various sizes (ranging 5-200+ people) by performing administrative duties.
- Delighted customers with positive and helpful interactions.
Highlights of Best Growth Experiences
- Weisberg Landscape Maintentance: General Office Admin, then Irrigation Manager (team of 3-4). Also modernized their website.
- CU Boulder, Dept of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures: General administrative duties to support professors and other staff.
- SEAKR Aerospace Engineering: Administrative Assistant to 200+; started as temp, then hired full time. Eventually was given so much new responsibility they hired an assistant for me.
- Minden Pictures: Administrative Assistant at a nature photography firm, included FTP site for image transfer.
Cumulative GPA: 3.66 | Deans’ List | 2006-2010*, 2014-2015
*Took leave when wife's father passed suddenly, moved to be closer to family for a few years
Cumulative GPA: 4.25/4.0 (Honors/AP scale) | Ranked #3 in class of 400+ | National Honors Society