Senior Fullstack Engineer

Full-stack Development Boston, Massachusetts, United States

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Summary

My path to Computer Science has been quite unconventional. It's not everyday you see a software engineer that studied theatrical set design and law enforcement before pivoting to computer science after all!

I started out writing tools and applications in Python to automate QA tasks at my first job. Some became full applications in and of themselves! The most complicated app I created was a full stack web app that we used to run load tests in our performance environments with the click of a button! Users could also schedule tests with a calendar, and see the progress of load tests in real time. In addition, the app wouldn't allow more than one load test to run in an environment at once, as this would mess up calculating the results. I accomplished this using Django and JQuery to render the web pages, Postgres to hold run settings and schedules, as well as Celery queues and websockets to provide the real time control over load tests.

I also modified an application that ran longevity tests on our user agent to work in Docker containers running on Kubernetes pods. This app created system events in the containers to check if the agent could consistently detect them without crashing or consuming too much disk and memory over long periods of time. We used four flavors of Linux containers, and the results were sent to a Prometheus database. QA testers could view trends over time with a Grafana dashboard.

Eventually, I was recognized for having a talent for frontend engineering as well, and I moved to the UI team at Uptycs, and then later I landed a fullstack position at my second job. There, I worked on an initiative to modernize their old PHP and Twig based UI to a React based one. The team I was on was a fullstack team responsible for several onboarding pages, so as part of the effort I researched how many different states and permissions combinations we would have to deal with and found there were over 7000 of them. Of course, we did not have the time to write 7000 testcases, so I used a Pairwise testing tool to pair down the number to 26.

As the team member with the most React and Typescript experience, a wrote coding standards and guides for how we would write and test our new UI, as well as mentored my other team members in React. I also created the schema for the new endpoints we would use for our React UI, including permissions information along with the objects affected by those permissions so we had a more consistent model of what users could do in both the backend and the frontend. At the end we released our first page successfully with minimal issues, though I was unfortunately laid off shortly after that.

Expectations

I am primarily looking for a place where I can collaborate with other developers to further my backend skills. I like being able to bounce ideas off of other people, and get useful feedback on my ideas. I am also looking for a place that values improving there processes, and where I can make an impact.