Brag Documents

A reminder to yourself to review what you’ve done this year. Catalogue your wins and reinforce good behaviour.

2020 In Review

Here is what I have to brag about in 2020 so far:

Technologies:

I have developed, integrated or otherwise taken the following technologies beyond “beginner”, or enhanced these skills with the following examples.

• Angular

  • Gone from knowing zero Angular to being the lead (sole) developer UI developer in a complex microservices application.
  • Lead the UI redesign including initial mock up and wireframes
  • Produced the scope of work within sprints
  • On boarded another UI developer and helped other experienced member re familiarise themselves with the code base
  • Deployed the redesign to production

• Vue.js

  • Built two separate web application with vue, both using Typescript
  • Both integrated into Python application backend’s using FastAPI

• Ansible

  • Identified that creating the infrastructure for deployments is tedious, error prone and not easily repeatable made learning ansible a high priority.
  • Successfully created a playbook to create a consistent deploy environment for side projects;
    • update server security and packages
    • install load balancer
    • ensure small servers have sufficient swap space (to compile javascript)
    • git operations on private and public repositories
    • encrypt secrets using vault
    • development with Vagrant and live instances

• Flask

  • Developed a bespoke application which could interface with other custom devices on a large network
  • Utilised plain javascript and server side rendered templates to create a UX that users found more familiar than the tool it replaced
  • Integrated stripe into Flask
  • Used a third party websockets service to facilitate realtime chat between users

• FastAPI

  • Deployed two application with the framework, replacing it with Flask in one instance

• Docker (and swarm)

  • Went from having a rudimentary understanding to being able to create detailed docker-compose files and deploy to a swarm
  • Now use docker as my development environment
  • All side projects have been ported to swarm with load balancing and HTTPS included
  • Utilised kubernetes for a short notice project and learnt the basics of the platform

Skills:

• Leadership
  • Lead the UI design and implementation after being assigned to short staffed, over worked close knit team on a complex microservice architecture.
  • Integrated well with the team and was able to provide subject matter expertise in Angular within a short period of time
  • Became the lead developer of another project requiring the integration of two systems (both in python) requiring facilitation of planning and design sessions between the teams
  • Speaking role in presentations selling our new product to senior management, including live demonstration of our MVP
• Design
  • High-level planning sessions for the integration of two platforms
  • Mock up and wireframing the UI for another team’s platform
• CI/CD
  • From being relatively inexperienced in CI/CD to developing pipelines for projects ranging from established to newly created
  • Learnt how to establish shell and docker runners in using Gitlab and AWS
  • Created segregated pipelines for separate deploys based on tags
  • Successfully integrated Github actions in all side project web applications, including deployment of containers to docker swarm
• Bash | Shell scripting
  • Took over established and complicated deployment shell scripts for production assets
  • Learnt a lot about debugging leading to the identification of several fixes resulting in the eradication of pipelines passing when they should have failed

Accomplishments:

• Deployed lic-investing.online
  • An Australian financial web application which visually shows whether certain stocks are trading at a premium or discount.
  • Uses FastAPI and Vue.js
  • Scrapes web resources using various techniques to gather the data, this includes punting that raw data into Postgres.
• Deployed check-redirects.com
  • Provides a service for tracing the redirection chain of a URL including status codes and response headers.
  • Includes an API for third parties
  • Built using FastAPI and Vue.js
• Replaced a rotting internal legacy tool with a web application:
  • Took an internal tool which was not being actively maintained and replaced it with Flask.
    • The tool needed to be either fixed or replaced to meet a looming deadline and our team was assigned to aid in unblocking the task
    • I first attempted to learn the code base and improve upon the design, however there were several critical issues which were cost prohibitive
    • After proposing a porting of the tool into a web application the design, implementation and handover of the task was completed in four weeks
    • This lead to the successful redeployment of a much needed tool, ultimately saving future development resources by rewriting it with a framework almost all developers in the organisation are familiar with.

After writing all this, its plain to see that I have achieved more than I realised.

The value in taking the time to write out what you have achieved over a period of time cannot be under estimated.

I did this in one sitting, unrefined and (mostly) unedited. This is for you to look back on and polish later when you need it.

what gets measured, gets managed. - Peter Drucker