A lot of automation and project scoping. Mostly working with business partners and engineers to scope out business automations in order to streamline and reduce tedious work.

Generally:

* A lot of 0->1 work

* Working with business stakeholders to determine what the team can build and how we should build them

* Updating projects to make them more debug-able, modular, and testable to make errors and outputs in production more reproducible

* Giving feedback/suggestions for projects and fixing service issues

* Try to improve how we work on various projects in terms of tooling and resources

* Helping other engineers that are stretched too thin and providing support where needed

Specifically:

* Help manage and improve an internal OCR service with fallbacks to different OCR providers

* Automated processing loan documents to make sure the numbers are correct against the information on the agreement, what is in Salesforce, and what is provided by the loan servicers

* Building a platform that consolidates disparate fleet management data and allows people to manage vehicle and driver assignments

* Calculating dues for non-remittance

* Working on an app for streamlining the solar installation process for foremen to help them validate the installations and register their meters

* Worked with solar designers, Oracle ERP, and other engineers to automate the generation of the bill of materials for solar installations from the design plans and designer inputs. This includes ongoing updates to available/new inventory across all warehouses and helping shift company priorities due to legislative changes. The goal is to increase the accuracy of BOMs and catching incorrect item assignments.

* Deployed a legacy service for trialing different design plans to estimate solar production of a given design

* Worked on registering some sites for Virtual Power Plants

* Worked on a dashboard for sales people

Teaching high school students Python!!! Teaching them how to debug things 😎

And I scream from the top of my lungs; 'What's Go-ing on?'"

List of things:

* Writing Go code, hooking things up/together

* Helped with setting up core initial services and wrote or helped review many of the exposed APIs

* Working on authentication/authorization stuff using Frontegg

* Worked on billing using Octane as a billing provider, added things like webhook handling, event metering, and price plan migrations

* Tracking, providing updates, and managing work associated with billing and metering

* Misc. account/billing state management

* Debugging things that Go wrong

* Code reviews

* Reading a bunch of docs and discuss system architecture decisions; brought up discussions to tangential, future work to scope out implementation details

* Work on improving telemetry recording

Developer/General QoL:

* learned about Tilt, live updates, and helped set up + speed up local dev environment iteration by 6-10x

* Integrated local development with the dev instance of third party services for local e2e testing of integrated services

* Wrote pre-commit scripts for checking yaml formatting/linting, go linting, and go mod tidy

* Improve slack script on prod deploys to increase visibility of changes for stakeholders

* Standardized logging between different services

"Who knows? Who knows where we will be in an hour, a day, a week, a month, a year? I’m just a simple software developer trying to develop software. Maybe somewhere along the way I’ll find out that it was I who was developing. I’m kind of just trying to learn what I can to help people out. I want to build stuff as fast as possible to figure out what works and what doesn’t. I’m trying to unblock people when they get stuck, but I have to remind myself to not burn out and to not chase towards some imaginary goal or some fairy-tale ending and live my life while there’s a life to live."

Generally writing Rust/Python code for services/SDKs and making sure protobuf changes are backwards-compatible. Reading a bunch of docs/code and working/talking with people to add new features to services.

Specifics:

* Measuring request contention and tracking cost of work

* Working on packaging flow for optimized models

* Learning misc. things about different ML frameworks, e.g. ONNX models have a 2gb size limit due to protobuf limitations

* Writing emails in Rust using handlebars templates

* Task/work generation logic

* Adding validation checks to internal tools

* Worked with Okta auth for a little bit

* Fix bugs in internal, service-testing tools

* Update/proofread public-facing documentation and tutorials related to the service/features

* Distributed task fanout using RabbitMQ with a coordinator and workers

* Help set up cloud-specific version of the optimization/packaging service

* Lots of querying/digging through logs in datadog

Smaller things:

* Fiddling with CI/CD pipelines

* Random stuff people ask for to improve QoL/help unblock them

Developer QoL:

* Setting up/fixing pre-commit hooks

* Setting up devcontainers for more local testing of deployed services

* Add debug log links to internal user UI to make debugging/tracing issues easier

* Fixing some logging/spans

Working in the Office of the Chief Economist with the Xbox Finance + Marketing team