Alchemy Code Lab

The Art Institutes

Frontend Engineer at y'all

Zapier

Frontend Engineer

• Provided freelance and contract print design, web design, and web development services to small, local organizations; specializing in document layout and static, informational websites.

Kate Sowles Design

Software Engineer + Designer

• Worked with a small-but-mighty team of engineers to provide our clients with flexible marketing sites in React with an emphasis on JAMstack (JavaScript, APIs, Markup) web applications.
• Mentored new teammates and a wide range of short-term contractors, helping them get access to the necessary systems and accounts as they got up to speed on relevant projects; including the maintenance of documentation on system setup and a variety of team workflows.
• Proactively initiated conversations surrounding team-wide conventions and best practices; adding automated safeguards where possible rather than relying on retroactive corrections.
• Created reusable project templates, vastly reducing the time required to "spin up" each new project; this greatly improved our consistency with asset management strategies and our use of common third-party libraries and service integrations.
• Delivered timely, constructive, and actionable feedback to engineering and agency leadership about areas of opportunity in our internal communication strategy, outlining the ways in which our current methods of communication were working against us, and offering several potential improvements that wouldn’t impede our highly collaborative environment.
• Advocated for modifying our project management systems to allow for the sub- division of product-oriented features into engineer-friendly task sizes; this included the introduction of automations to ensure as much of the broadly applicable information remained in sync across the various planning environments and scopes.

y'all

• Launched new resources to help parents understand and prepare for the spread of COVID-19.
• Worked closely with our Design team to consolidate iconography and illustration assets commonly used across our suite of applications into a unified and reusable resource.
• Facilitated company-wide discussions around inclusive language, offering improvements that enable us to better recognize and respect patients belonging to minoritised communities.
• Created a detailed proposal for offering public "what to expect" outlines (relevant to potential applicants as well as existing employees) for high-impact topics such as company values, role requirements and expectations across experience levels, compensation ranges and benefits, holidays and leave policies, a description of our interview processes, promotion and career progression outlines. Offering this information upfront would show respect for the time and personalized requirements of employees, allowing them to make decisions and initiate important conversations from an informed and empowered position.

Brave Care

• Incrementally converted our Support team's internal CRM from the legacy ColdFusion application into a modern React app with a focus on improving known accessibility shortcomings as well as improving developer experience by removing large swathes of redundant or abandoned code.
• Conducted cross-team interviews with several members of our Support team, assessing how our application hindered their daily productivity; I was then able to better advocate for their needs in product planning sessions and request time to make corrections; whenever possible, I included these improvements in among regularly scheduled tasks as time allowed.
• Led an initiative to reduce the number of synchronous discussions that interrupted the team's prized "heads down" time; introducing the addition of an automated Slack prompt, allowing for asynchronous participation without sacrificing the incremental progress updates the product team requested. Similarly, I managed to consolidate several individual team meetings around topics that affected all of engineering, allowing us to better collaborate and keep from stepping on each others toes. This new format included opportunities to submit comments/concerns and put together an outline for meeting objectives several days before each month’s meeting; as a result we saw gains in developer satisfaction, time management, and trust between the individual teams as we were all able to avoid being put on the spot without an opportunity to prepare.
• Partnered with the Support team to identify users that had somehow become lost in our typical cycle. With those users identified I was able to work with our Project Manager to prioritize the correction of the unexpected account states as well as the faulty logic responsible for the errors.

Sightbox

• On a team of two engineers, I was tasked with ownership of the application’s front- end. After coordinating with our Director of Engineering to plan integration with the existing APIs, I rebuilt the application with Angular, ensuring feature parity before going on to expand the capabilities of the application, bringing it in line with the founder’s original vision.
• Met the need for a mobile app by integrating the Ionic framework, which allowed for the reuse of significant portions of our application in order to quickly launch iOS and Android apps.
• Attended an Angular-centric developer conference, returning with an outline of my recommendations for improvements and corrections to our application based on the copious notes I made about the daily presentations, project days, and conversations with several prominent members of the Angular community.

DealSite

Software Engineer

• Maintained an average customer satisfaction rating of 98% in both email and chat- based customer support communications.
• Developed internal template design comparison resource for Support agents, making it simpler to compare site templates in order to best meet the needs of the customers they were assisting, which was one of the most common reasons people reached out to our support team.
• Mentored several new teammates, getting them up to speed with internal systems, resources, and best practices; provided a collection of text-expansion responses for many of our most common support requests, offering variations based on whether they were offering support via email or via live-chat.
• Served as an on-call resource for agents struggling with more advanced requests and issues, walking them through the information provided by the customer, clarifying the objective, and helping them connect the dots in a format that would be easy for the customer to follow.
• Developed an internal directory where folks could specify their interests, areas of experience (and how they’d rate their level of experience with that skill) in an effort to enable collaboration between individual teams, disparate departments, and across our three support offices.

Squarespace

Design + Technical Support

• Provided live radio dispatch for our ad-hoc roll-off drivers as they delivered and removed large dumpsters from work sites across Portland; this included coordination to ensure proper conditions at each site to allow safe access by our drivers, or to reschedule services in the event that access conditions couldn't be met promptly.
• Compiled waste diversion reports for a subset of our customers, outlining how much of the material from their company (frequently broken down by individual project or site) was able to be diverted from the landfill. Updated the pre-existing (fully manual) report to utilize spreadsheet formulas, pivot tables, and charts, which resulted in fewer clerical errors, ~20% decrease in time required to complete each report, and a more informative format s showing the diversion rate for that month as well as across the site’s service history.
• Created step-by-step documentation and cross-trained two teammates in the tasks and business functions I had originally performed alone.
• Handled accounts receivable for our roll-off dumpster services, including the facilitation of seasonal pro-bono services for local non-profits.