I was a team lead on one of the platform teams at Contrast. My main role was to improve stability and predictability of the software and do regular support rotations. I worked a lot with EC2, automating spinning up EC2 instances and configuring IAM roles and S3 buckets to test that our on-premises software could install and run as expected on various OS including Windows and several flavors of Linux. I also worked extensively on CI and on Mysql performance and Mysql/Postgresql compatibility.

Cashstar was acquired by Blackhawk Network in 2017. For about a year I was a senior engineer continuing to maintain and improve on the giftcard platform with Python/Django and using Scrum and Jira. I also helped organize our summer internship program and continued to assist with production support.

After some time I took the training and was made a Scrum Master which I did for about 18 months - while continuing to contribute as a team member at about half time or so. In that role I focused on facilitating, training, coaching, and trying to improve our practices sprint by sprint. As part of that, I travelled to Kyiv to work in person with our Ukrainian contractor colleagues for a few weeks in 2018 which, besides being personally awesome for me, helped bring the team together. The most important thing to me as a Scrum Master and especially during a time of remote work was to help foster an environment where everyone is included and able to speak their mind.

I worked on a Scrum team using Python/Django, as well as JS/React, to create and support eGift card products. Projects I worked on included building on a promotions platform, modernizing our user experiences, distributing eGift cards over Twitter, and of course production support.

One of the projects I helped build was CashStar Product e-Gifting. This product won a PayTech award from FinTech Futures for best new Ecommerce initiative of 2018 - https://www.bankingtech.com/2018/07/paytech-awards-2018-and-the-winners-are/

Almost every day I did code review, had scrum meetings, wrote code, and investigated a bug. My everyday tools included Hipchat, PyCharm, Mercurial (and later, Git), Sequel Pro, Sublime Text, and Bitbucket.

Tutored topics including basics of coding, using an IDE, Java, and object-oriented programming concepts like classes, subtyping, and polymorphism.