I have a decade of experience working at an enterprise-focused
marketing technology startup. I’ve worked on everything from
cross-browser bugs to building major features to tracking down
poorly-written SQL.
I believe in collaboration and a positive work environment that
forgives mistakes. I value clear communication, reproducible work, and
automation that ensures quality.
I’m entirely self-taught, picking up new skills as required. I’ve
learned about topics like internationalization, accessibility and
ARIA,
time zones and
ISO 8601,
E.164 and
NANP,
and how emoji are implemented in Unicode.
I was the first employee at the company, and over time I contributed to
every level of the technology stack. The leadership respected that I
didn’t want to become a manager, and instead I was trusted to work on
problems that other teams didn’t have time to address. Beginning in
2016 I set up several hours of
appointment slots
every day to pair with anyone who needed help.
Site Reliability Engineer — –
I convinced my managers to let me create this role based on what I’d
learned from Google’s
SRE book. I
collaborated closely with the Platform Operations team, but my projects
were largely self-directed.
My biggest achievement was a report that examined the entire platform,
from JavaScript error rates to
AWS costs. I found we could
save > 25% of annual hosting expenses, and identified high-value
opportunities to improve application performance.
Other stuff I accomplished:
performed several dozen root-cause analyses for performance and
reliability issues
ran blameless postmortems, sometimes including upper management
from across the company
used Sumo Logic to analyze
logs from AWS CloudTrail, Ruby on Rails, the Linux
syslog, and more
wrote and shared 100+ preconfigured log searches to help others
construct advanced queries
created personal monitoring dashboards and wrote guidance for other
teams
built alerts for AWS permissions and Jenkins
pipelines
evangelized code linting with tools like
ShellCheck
wrote a tool to parse the Rails codebase and automatically tag
application requests by responsible team
built system for managing technical documentation, including
integrations with external services like GitHub, Jira, and Slack
wrote weekly reports to the engineering team reviewing anomalies,
work I completed, and interesting articles I’d read
Full stack developer — –
This is when I developed a lot of the skills and knowledge I used in
the SRE role. I helped build, maintain, and refactor large
portions of the application.
reimplemented entire user authentication system
per-customer password requirements
two-factor authentication, including custom library to parse
arbitrarily-formatted phone numbers (built on top of
libphonenumber)
diagnosed issues with
SAML
SSO integrations and
implemented new functionality
migrated ad-hoc auth code to a single well-defined,
well-tested implementation
spent a year on a tiny team that significantly improved development
efficiency for other engineers
(things like CI,
CD, and foreign key
constraints)
performed 90%+ of all dependency upgrades — from security updates
to migrating between major versions of Rails
packaged the application using Puppet for an on-premise
installation isolated from the internet
cut time-to-first-paint by ⅔, addressing the top user complaint
about the platform
wrote tooling in TypeScript to analyze in-browser performance
lead architect for frontend code through several major overhauls as
business strategy shifted
led conversions from jQuery to Backbone and JavaScript to
CoffeeScript
made core contributions on several complex frontend
applications, with varying team sizes
built a well-tested UI-component library with strong
accessibility support
sole engineer working on user analytics for about 18 months
built a pipeline that applied rich metadata but only needed a
simple function call in the browser
built reporting tools for account representatives that blended
analytics data with the product’s database
We the Media
Frontend developer — –
My first job after the Great Recession. Not a lot to discuss: it was
agency work, and around I began
contributing to the project that became Opal.
worked with Wordpress (blog templates for clients and internal use)
and Ruby on Rails (a donation platform for Nike),
Facebook API (voting on videos from a dance competition)
Jordan Cole
hire-me@ratafia.info,
971 408 8248