Provided Technical Consultation

My team created the Product Marketing strategy for WHO’s first financial digital product, making it easier for donors and investors to contribute to financing NCD prevention. Non-Communicable Diseases account for a significant percentage of deaths in lower income countries, and raising awareness and finance to combat these, is a step forward promoting socio-economic development in these regions. 

Reviewed a massive 400 file Pull Request from a 'community contributor' that upgraded one of our systems from the deprecated .NET Framework 4 to .NET [Core] 5.

Working in open source with changes from folks outside your team can be challenging, especially when the scope of work is so large. It's important to be respectful but firm, and meticulous without nitpicking, all in a publicly-viewable forum.

It took about a month to complete, capturing the high-level differences and low-hanging fruit, and then testing and reviewing changes with a fine-toothed comb, project-by-project and file-by-file.

Besides defects and issues (which there were surprisingly few) there were opportunities to make my job as reviewer easier (the diff was initially 800 files due to renames) which needed to be addressed quickly, as well as minor-but-important corrections to match coding styles and practices common to our other applications and systems.

Since the diff was so large, it was impossible to use GitHub's inline comment tools, so instead I left top-level comments with checklists related to the changes. Conversation with the contributors could get lost in the sea of things so it was important to group comments well. An accidental merge of another feature by a teammate meant we had to do some Git fancy footwork to right the path of the tree.

Overall the critical feedback was limited and the contributors were great to work with. Changes were merged with only a couple follow-up tasks for our internal team. A success!

Led a small team during a six-week development effort to add new features of a non-profit backed community open source project: a staff directory for school district personnel administrators.

Our team "cleaned up" some wonky leftovers from the last round of features, fixing bugs, improving the UI, and adding new features to better support the application's critical goals. I provided technical guidance, reviewed code, and implemented a large-scale schema upgrade to support the latest version of the data platform the app integrates with. 

Executed a four-week discovery period to investigate and design a solution to support a resilient failover process for a client with a power grid management software, followed by leading a small team for six weeks of development.

The client system was a mix of a monolithic back-end service, Windows application UI, and some new, Docker-ized services: a new web front end, and several back-end analytics services. Our solution included using Docker orchestration for the new services mixed with a manual, "hot standby" for the backend service, with some initial work to start to decouple critical parts from the monolith.

The development work involved migrating state from files to a database, establishing new build and deploy processes, configuring high availability for existing infrastructure, and creating tools and utilities for their site technicians. Besides the discovery and solution design, I was responsible for detailing, organizing, and assigning work, reviewing code, and implementing parts of the solution across the board.

Completed development effort to replace Slackbot used for factory floor operations at a small manufacturing plant. Implemented a new scheduling API with a corresponding React front-end.

The new system increased reliability and schedule visibility for floor managers, as well as a more maintainable and extensible solution from a development perspective with unit tests, continuous integration, and design not realistic to get from the legacy slackbot implementation.

Completed DevOps platform migration for a medium-sized retailer's sales and manufacturing process.

Over the past 9 months, I led the effort of updating the target infrastructure and automated build and release processes to support a larger shift to containerized, cloud-based architecture that integrated with new sales platform. I established common patterns and provided documentation and training to create a "culture of DevOps" and set the dev teams up for success after delivery.