Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
I am a storyteller. I am a designer. I am an engineer, but my true interests lie with people and their experiences - code is just one medium and set of tools to reach them with. I’ve been a "web developer" since before I turned ten (my first project being an Age of Empires fan site for the Mac release in 2001), and I have been immersed in that world ever since. From that point on, I started making websites for any and every interest I had, for my friends, for family, for non-profits and educators. I designed blogs, e-commerce sites, online learning and events platforms, Flash games - I even scraped my university’s course portal to create alternative visual weekly schedules with suggested classes that fit. In 2015, ahead of the Canadian federal election, I created a website which allowed anyone to easily look up the voting records of their MP (https://globalnews.ca/news/2255964/canadian-brothers-create-website-to-show-mps-bill-voting-history/). Shortly after, I joined Medallia and spent 3 years designing bespoke integrations to deliver customer and employee feedback across all levels of business, from frontline to executives. In 2020, I joined Inscopix to lead the development of a brand new SaaS platform for managing, analyzing, and sharing neuroscience research data, an ambitious project started from scratch that is now in use in over a hundred institutions in academia and industry. My role in this has been far from limited to software engineer: I was a recruiter, a designer, a coder, an architect, a product manager, an engineering manager, a mentor, IT support, office admin, event planner, and release manager. Over the past five years, I have helped build a team and its culture from the ground up, and through blood, sweat, and tears we built a platform that supports scientific and medical research around the world. My home is JavaScript/TypeScript and React based applications, but I am very comfortable in the world of Python, and have worked in C++ and Java, too. But more than working in any language, what I enjoy is understanding and facilitating human experiences—building intuitive applications that allow them to put their thoughts, research, products, and ideas out into the world. I enjoy being an interface between the technical and the creative, the demands of business and end-users, and the management of resources and opportunities. I enjoy getting to know people deeply—who they are, what they want, and how they want to grow—and clearing the path for them to realize that potential.
In these last two years my focus has been on driving growth within the Inscopix Data Exploration & Sharing cloud platform and the Data Product team — in sales and customer base, in processes and maturity, in scalability and usability, and most importantly in the team around me. I have designed and driven the implementation of hundreds of new product features based on the feedback of our customers from over a hundred different academic institutions and industry leaders. The product has transformed in this time to match the vision I helped set years ago, maturing from a tightly-focused MVP into a highly adaptable and scalable generalized solution for scientific data management and analysis. These features include a wholly new paradigm for joining and linking scientific datasets, the ability for users to upload and securely execute custom analysis code, and complex data interactivity capabilities allowing users to view and edit multimodal research data directly in their browser. Aside from user-sourced feature requests, I partnered closely with our Commercial and Support teams to ensure our roadmap represented their needs in driving sales and minimizing the support burden of an ever-expanding user base. Standing at the nexus of external and internal stakeholders, I have managed the planning, prioritization, and deployment of engineering resources to effectively grow our platform while supporting our existing users. But of course I could never do all this alone;my own area of greatest growth has been in helping to develop the team and processes necessary to maintain this rapid rate of development. I would say what I value most in my work is, in the end, enabling others to realize their best potential—to understand where they want to go and how they want to grow and create the conditions to facilitate that. Creating those paths and seeing junior engineers grow to be confident and capable architects, designers, and visionaries has been the greatest reward possible.
As the de-facto TPM and lead frontend engineer, my role was to drive the rapid development of the Inscopix Data Exploration & Sharing platform to fulfill an ambitious roadmap of features demanded by our customers. I can best describe this period as a myriad of critical balancing acts: how to prioritize immediate business and customer demands for features against the foundational development work that would provide a stable platform for us to build on. When to create things that scale and when to move fast. What to develop in-house and when to partner with existing solutions. How to balance speed and quality of development. Where to bend our initial vision to follow where our users were leading us. I was front and centre in making these decisions in the hopes of creating the conditions under which this new platform could grow to its potential. In that year I recruited three engineers to expand the frontend team, taking on a mentorship role and stepping into the role of engineering manager in all but official title. I onboarded and facilitated the growth and development of these new team members, established our collaborative processes and practices, oversaw product management, provided coaching and conducted performance reviews. I was responsible for scoping requirements, building roadmaps, and effectively managing team resources. As an individual contributor, I continued to spearhead development of our React/TypeScript frontend and worked alongside my backend lead to develop the Django/Python-based backend with a Postgres database, all hosted in AWS. I designed and developed an organizational model for research data, essentially combining the power of relational databases with large document storage in the familiar interface of a spreadsheet application. Our customers and even Inscopix’s internal science teams could now run complex analyses through a scalable cloud pipeline through an intuitive interface without any IT support or programming expertise required.
As one of the two "Design Experts" on Medallia's engineering team, my role was to be the private investigator for challenging partner support issues in the implementation and servicing of all parts of the Medallia platform. These were usually problems where the documentation had been followed to a tee, where everything should have worked, and yet somehow an issue remained. Once it came to me, my job was to fact-find and problemsolve to understand where the root cause lay - did we document something wrong? Is our code not aligned to the product requirements? Is there an edge case here we never anticipated? Getting to the bottom of each issue required deep knowledge of all systems across the platform, as well as the ability to quickly determine which teams and individuals were involved. I needed to be able to just easily talk to an engineer about specifics of implementation as I could to a product manager or partner analyst, and frequently wrote customer-facing explanations and documentation. This was a communication role as much as it was a technical one, leaning on my abilities to encapsulate complex concepts at the appropriate level for any part of the business org or customer. And at the end, I drove resolutions - whether it was a bug fix, a documentation writeup, a process error, or a training scenario. Through this experience I gained a strong intuition for the strengths and weaknesses of our product, documentation, and architecture - what to strive for and what to avoid - and formed a strong base of opinions on how to create robust software that minimizes support burden.
I implemented the Medallia platform for some of the largest companies on the planet, specializing in complex and secure integrations between our services and our customers' data warehouses, APIs, and internal reporting. I created rulesets and interfaces that directed feedback to the appropriate levels, in some cases directly to company executives, to maximize the effectiveness of our solutions and drive organizational changes to improve customer and employee experiences.
Created websites, e-commerce, and learning platforms for non-profits and individuals as an independent developer. Projects included: votes.mp: independent project for looking up voting records of Members of Parliament (React/Javascript/Flask) neufeldinstitute.com: non-profit online learning, events, discussion, and video platform for parents and educators (Wordpress/PHP/MySQL/Filemaker) rulechangers.org: non-profit political science outreach (Wordpress/PHP) rachelmayeri.com: media site for research projects in animal behaviour (Wordpress/PHP)
• Led an international team of 8 students, professors, and industry liaisons from the United States and Japan to develop a treatment device for the removal of hazardous radioactive material from skin. • Developed several prototypes and successfully demonstrated their superior effectiveness with a novel assay which showed removal efficiencies as high as 95% (compared to 70% for existing solutions).