Me, in two sentences: I'm an experienced senior software engineer specializing in React and Ruby. I want to help your team move fast and keep a high bar.
That quality/speed balance is something I pride myself on. Here's a few quotes from former teammates/managers:
Scott is both a prolific engineer and a great team player. His ability to move fast while keeping attention to detail and code quality high is one of his greatest strengths.
Scott embodies the 80/20 move fast culture while still delivering quality products.
Scott is a producing machine. I always love reviewing his code reviews because they tend to be small and easy to understand, and well tested.
Scott was awesome to work with this quarter. He moves FAST and never makes me feel like what I have asked is not doable.
My other primary ability is focusing on impact. I like working on the most important problems, the ones that will help my team contribute the most to the company's mission.
Scott effectively changed the business model for Scribd over the course of 6 short weeks, which is a very impressive accomplishment.
Another admirable trait is his eagerness to always be working on the most important problem. Regardless of size, challenge, or appeal.
He regularly suggests product, design and engineering ideas for how to achieve our mission and is great about focusing on the highest priority/highest impact tickets.
He's very good at seeing the big picture when presented with projects, ideas, and challenges. This means that his code is well-structured and easy to navigate, and he has insightful input on every project we've worked on.
Along with his communication skills, Scott is one of the best at working with few requirements.
As far as tech stack goes, I'm proficient in the following areas:
- React & JavaScript
- Ruby on Rails
- CSS
- React Native
- Node.js
- GraphQL
- Next.js & Gatsby
I also have experience in the following, and would love to learn more:
- Django & Python
As far as new skills go, I would be especially eager to learn the following:
- Rust
- Go
Work experience
Scribd
My current position is with Scribd, working for the SlideShare team. Scribd does not have a quarterly peer review process, so I don't have many good quotes to share, but here's a sample of the projects I've worked on:
- Launching and rapidly iterating on an ads implementation; I was the main developer on the project, and it's projected to bring in millions of dollars in revenue over the next year
- Rearchitecting a jQuery spaghetti-code frontend into a well-tested React app (ongoing), overseeing the project from technical design to implementation
- Building an end to end testing suite using Cypress
- Planning out a migration to GraphQL
- Doing a complete rewrite of major user-facing features, including the upload flow and slideshow player
- Implementing several fullstack features that helped the site integrate better with Scribd
- Implementing Sentry for the frontend for better error tracking
Here's some recent feedback from my manager (Q3 2022):
Scott has repeatedly demonstrated his ability as a top-level individual contributor
Scott effectively changed the business model for Scribd over the course of 6 short weeks, which is a very impressive accomplishment
In my first year and a half at Slideshare, I became a top 3 all-time contributor on the nine year old codebase, in terms of lines of coded added, deleted, and total commits.
Indeed.com
I was hired by Indeed at the end of 2017, and started on the Assessments team, specifically working on the candidate experience.
Here's a few projects I worked on:
- rebuilding our Twilio integration for audio interviews
- building the video interview feature (front and back-end)
- integrating GraphQL on both the Rails and React sides (including evaluating the technology and selling the team on it)
- building a custom form library (affectionately named "Duck Forms")
- designing, building, and shipping the Computer Adaptive Testing feature, implementing a machine learning algorithm from scratch
- making performance improvements across the front-end
- building a developer "handbook" with our team's best practices, deployment process, and values
Some relevant feedback:
Scott has become our resident audio and video interview expert and has deep knowledge of the software and systems for it. I trust him to not only do the tickets assigned to him in a high-quality manner, but also for him to think through if that ticket is the best way to address the problem or if there are other improvements we could be making.
Scott has been a pleasure to work with during the pull request cycle, and is in the main group of people I don't hesitate asking general questions because I know the response will be prompt and welcome.
Scott will always step up and take on any project without complaint and he does a quick job (and does it well). He has also done a great job talking out and explaining his work and reasons to other people on the team.
After leaving the Assessments team, I moved to the more general "Candidates" team. Soon after, we started work on a six-month "big swing" project to completely overhaul the UI for employers and add a bunch of new functionality.
This project involved coordinating with several teams across Indeed. I played a multi-faceted role, including doing design documents for certain features, breaking work down into JIRA epics/issues, helping other teams integrate with our APIs, and planning a fast-follow refactor project to correct our tech debt.
The Candidates team was composed of 11 developers, but by the end of this project, I had completed 30% of the relevant tickets (in terms of story points).
Here's some feedback from this project, codenamed "Hansel":
Scott was instrumental to the success of Hansel. He did an amazing job joining this team, taking ownership over jobs tab and ensuring it was released early.
Scott single handedly supported Hansel ATS Jobs Management for the last 2 quarters. He is very responsive, good mentor and holds his peers to high standard. All the feedbacks that I have from the team have been very positive.
Scott has been critical to the success of Hansel ATS over the last six months. His ability to thoughtfully execute work in a timely manner is bar none, and whenever he picks up a ticket I always know he's going to do a good job with it.
After leaving the Candidates team, I moved to a team called "Engineering Excellence." Our goal was to provide support across a particular organization in making teams more efficient and productive.
Our major project was moving the entire organization to a "push on green" deployment process (continuous deployment on passing tests). We paired with certain teams, developed an effective process, and then produced documentation to help other teams do the same.
I left Indeed before the project was complete, but we were on track to complete our goal by the end of the year.
I will partner with Scott on initiatives any day of the week. He feels ownership and stays focused. He engages the right people at the right time. He applies pressure appropriately. He is transparent and responsive.
Scott has all the things I'd want in a SWE. Both when it comes to working with him on a ticket as well as when he's being a lead on an initiative that affects the whole team (i.e. PoG). Scott has so much technical aptitude, willingness to dig in, and was very easy/collaborative to work with.
Scott has been very helpful as my team makes this transition. He provided us with a roadmap for the transition, and helped us stick to it. Since we achieved push-on-green, he has remained available to help both with general process problems and with specific implementation tickets.
Scott has an impressive ability to consider possible roadblocks in projects and communicate them to the relevant stakeholders before the project officially starts.
After leaving Indeed, I joined an early-stage startup as a founding engineer, but left when it wasn't a great fit for me. After that, I did some contracting, but mostly took a mini-sabbatical to think about my next steps, which led me to Scribd.
MuseFind
Prior to working at Indeed, I worked at a start-up called MuseFind, which provided a platform for social media influencers to connect with brands. Here are the highlights:
- led a rebranding project which encompassed the entire front-end app & static site
- was the sole developer for building a React Native app, which was completed in six months
- became Lead Developer, responsible for initiative & sprint planning, as well as mentoring junior developers
Writing
Throughout my developer career, I've been passionate about helping other developers excel. Teaching has helped me grow and deepen my own understanding of technical concepts, and it's been very satisfying to help others advance their careers.
To see all my articles, visit my Medium page. You can also see some of my best writing at the the homepage of this site or via the Articles page.
Aside from short pieces, I also published a book called Progressive Web Apps with React.
I also did some in-person mentoring at the bootcamp I graduated from, Lighthouse Labs. I served as a mentor for students and also taught their introductory web development course.
My values
I like working on effective & collaborative teams, where we have clear goals and clear impact.
I especially value a supportive culture. I've always tried to be available and responsive when my teammates need help, and my favourite managers have been those who were seriously committed to my success.
Part of that culture is open communication. I constantly ask my managers for feedback, and do my best to follow their suggestions, and I also try to be as honest as possible with them.
When a great culture is in place, all that's left is to move fast and write excellent code. One of the themes of my writing is emphasizing that empathy is the most important developer skill: being able to understand the point of view of your users, your teammates, or just the next person to read your code. That's how you get speed without sacrificing quality.
Last but not least, I want to be on a team that achieves business goals. Our job is to serve the user. If we fail to do that, the best code in the world doesn't matter.
Feedback
To wrap things up, here's some more feedback I've received at Indeed, MuseFind, and from my teaching:
I can't say enough good things about Scott. As my mentor he has really inspired me to push myself harder and improve even more. I feel like throughout my development career there have been a few pivotal people who really helped me take my skills to the next level, and Scott is one of them.
My favorite thing about working with Scott is his ability to communicate. Whenever he picks up a design ticket, he'll proactively ask questions if he runs into anything he's unsure of, resulting in an accurate implementation of the designs every time.
Scott is my favorite engineer to work with. He is extremely skilled and writes succinct, efficient code. On top of that, he is extremely active with code reviews and his feedback on my work has made me a stronger developer.
Scott is a very strong full stack developer that has the ability to work on all kinds of different platforms. His primary work in React and Ruby on Rails is very strong, to the point where if I'm ever stuck on an issue, regardless of the platform, I know I can ask him for help.
Scott is a great person to work with and is a strong developer. He maintains a very high velocity during our sprints, and I always know if I need something from him I’ll get it back quickly.
Scott continues to be a fantastic asset to the team and I count ourselves very grateful to have him.
He was my team lead and more importantly my mentor at Musefind and whenever I had technical or even career questions, he always took the time and provided great advice. As a team member or a leader, Scott has my highest recommendation.
With an innate sense of curiosity, Scott excels by taking on projects outside the scope of his role as well as leading and inspiring his team. His prolific and consistently viral content on MuseFind's Tech blog as well as his rapid ascension within the organization is a testament to his skill.
Thanks for reading. You can reach me via LinkedIn. Let's build something amazing.