Feb 2021 – Feb 2022 · 1 yr · Remote

• • Sponsored as a full-time contributor on the WordPress open source project, primarily focusing on the development of the Gutenberg Block Editor.

Jan 2017 – Feb 2021 · 4 yrs 1 mo · Remote

• Led product teams in size from 3-15 direct reports. Delivered features primarily in the WordPress.com admin dashboard interface, including comments management, SFTP/SSH controls, the home dashboard, payment blocks, various editor integrations, and more
• Successfully drove a time-sensitive integration of the WordPress Block Editor on WordPress.com coordinating work across division and team boundaries. This editor integration was important for validating needed use cases and providing early feedback in the core WordPress project.
• Made teams more predictable and happy by experimenting with process and best practices, continually adapting to feedback and needs each sprint. Turned around a struggling team to become one of the most respected at the company. The developed team practices were organically adopted by other teams across the company.
• Influenced work culture by clarifying expectations of manager and individual contributor responsibilities in the WordPress.com division. Automattic is a mostly flat company with a choose-your-own approach to role building. This provides freedom, but leaves some feeling lost. Clearer expectations let folks better understand what to aim for and how they were performing.
• Addressed performance management issues with empathy, by continually clarifying expectations, providing timely feedback, and realistic goal setting.
• Provided opportunities for reports with time-boxed projects that are a stretch but are still achievable with support. Prior reports have gone on to lead other teams, or larger technical projects. Encouraged personal growth even if it means moving away from the team.
• Chosen as Chrome Customer Advisory Board representative for Automattic 2018-2020

Nov 2015 – Jan 2017 · 1 yr 2 mos · Remote

• Worked primarily on projects in the WordPress.com dashboard interface (wp-calypso), focusing on both framework and customer workflows. Framework improvements included adding a persistence layer for client data and cache invalidation, pinning package versions for production stability and general maintenance around Node and other package upgrades.
• Outside of team responsibilities, regularly guided new contributors on their first-deploy and would step in to help folks debug outages. Code reviewed PRs across teams frequently and encouraged more cross-team collaboration.
• Contributed with hiring, primarily focusing on leading trials in the final stage. At the time candidates worked on real problems and these paid trials could run for a full month.
• Cleaned up magic number z-indexes for a hack day project. As part of that I created a Chrome extension to help debug stacking contexts.

Nov 2014 – Aug 2015 · 9 mos

• As a shopping team member:
• Worked with Node, Coffeescript, MongoDB.
• Helped lead a major refactor on legacy product availability code.
• Worked with team on Weeklies, a streamlined subscription feature.
• Proactively plugged an outstanding billing memory leak.
• Set the direction on new email tooling, which greatly boosted developer productivity speed.
• Promoted more constructive code reviews, better integration testing methods and provided a new pattern for our scheduled jobs.

Mar 2013 – Jun 2014 · 1 yr 3 mos

• Vine meets Atlassian JIRA, winner of March 2013 Atlassian Codegeist competition and $10k prize.
• Prototyped a chrome extension to record video of your open tab, and quickly file JIRA bug reports. Our stand-alone video recording extension saw over 2k users and continued organic growth.

Nov 2010 – Oct 2014 · 3 yrs 11 mos

• I had the rare chance to be able to completely rewrite and re-architect key portions of a flash app to HTML5, when the tooling and technology was still young.
• Project Highlights:
• HTML5 Editor
• Worked with team to move from flash to HTML5 to future-proof our Editor as well as speed up development time.
• Created a Java library to convert SVG mustache templates into fast canvas drawing commands
• (example of speed difference: http://jsperf.com/canvg-vs-canvas/9)
• Used the command pattern to make each editor action a command for easy undo/redo
• Implemented Copy/Paste and Smart Paste (remembers the last shape offset)
• Implemented a constraint system to support multi-part shapes and custom shape behavior
• Maintained PNG export support
• Helped clean up problem areas in code as well as lots and lots of bugfixing
• Added ability to create custom shape libraries from SVG or images
• Implemented client side Canvas to SVG library: https://github.com/gliffy/canvas2svg
• HTML5 Viewer
• The HTML5 Viewer was a proof of concept that we could display any of our existing diagrams using HTML5 technologies.
• Worked with team to standardize and clean up our shape format.
• Prototyped and implemented key client features in the viewer.
• Added svg non-scaling stroke support to our modified version of canvg
• Implemented dashed line and multi-line text canvas support
• Confluence Integration
• Ensured that the Gliffy plugin had a seamless workflow in the Confluence tinymce editor.

Jul 2010 – Nov 2010 · 4 mos

• Admin Tools for the Lithium Application
• Developed contextual point-and-click editing tool to allow admins to quickly inspect and modify component text, settings and page layout.

Jul 2008 – Jul 2010 · 2 yrs

• Worked as a performance engineer for 6 months before transitioning to end-user feature development.
• Highlights:
• Lithium End-User Feature Development
• Worked with team to update search algorithm to group results by thread, overhauled UI.
• Helped to create an intuitive, streamlined, mobile view of the app
• Implemented various features such as autosave, spoiler tags, and recent unread messages.
• Lithium Integration - Twitter Badge, Facebook Connect
• Worked with team to connect Twitter accounts via oAuth. Users could update Twitter background with community stats. Extended skin system to create Twitter specific skins.
• Started initial development work on integration with Facebook Connect to allow users to register with a single click.
• Created a Load Generation Tool, specific to the Lithium Application
• Tested server-side performance. Response time, memory usage, cpu usage, etc. recorded using MXBeans. At the time, could generate enough load to cripple simulated production environment.
• Framework agnostic, with multiple modes of behavior. Apache HttpClient, Selenium etc. could be used to drive traffic.

May 2007 – Aug 2007 · 3 mos

• Created a skeleton script framework that automated Bluetooth chip testing by remotely controlling several devices and collecting test results in a relevant excel format.

May 2006 – Aug 2006 · 3 mos

• Wrote Perl scripts that transformed hard to read text files into relevant excel reports.