I transitioned within Cox Automotive from Manheim to Cox Automotive Engineering Enablement.

With this transition I became 100% remote and had my first experience of joining a new team and building relationships in a mostly remote environment. Since I was close enough to travel for larger organizational gatherings there was some in-person time on a quarterly basis.

The move to this team meant managing instances of Artifactory and GitHub with much bigger user counts. The Artifactory and GitHub that I helped manage on my previous team were going to be decommissioned and merged into the ones managed by my new team. On this team Terraform and Terragrunt were used heavily. I learned the Go programming language and continued to write tools to help with deploying software.

I continued honing my AWS knowledge and skills. Eventually starting to work with serverless architectures, I lead the development of a cost calculation pipeline that consisted of Go based Lambda Functions that could be tested locally and deployed with Terraform. Some other tools were developed to help with the management of services managed by my team.

In the spirit of having more autonomy over my team’s processes and application management, I learned how to develop Service Now workflows so that we could define how users are onboarded to our services and how support requests are submitted.

Transitioned away from the Ruby on Rails team that I was on when I started working at the company. Interest in Cloud infrastructure, CI/CD and testing methodologies drove me to seek out an opportunity to put these things into practice at Manheim. I joined what was one of the first DevOps teams at Manheim.

During this time I developed and deployed CI/CD pipelines for multiple teams within the company. Most of these applications were being deploying into AWS using CloudFormations or Elastic Beanstalk. I also developed a library on top of the Jenkins Job DSL that allowed us to quickly create CI/CD pipelines in Jenkins using abstractions that fit into our companies philosophy. This became the primary way that my team created and managed new pipelines for other teams within the company.

During this time I learned Terraform, Packer, Groovy and Java. I honed my AWS knowledge and skillset. I also attended a conference about DevOps and researched what this new concept meant. I also, started working remotely more and more. The last year on this team I was almost 100% remote and exploring ways to improve remote work.

Eventually my team would come to test, deploy and maintain tools for improving the work lives of developers at Manheim. Tools included Artifactory, GitHub, Hashicorp Consul and Hashicorp Vault.

After starting out as an Associate, I was promoted to a Software Developer. Continue to work on the same team developing Ruby on Rails applications. Started delving into Continuous Delivery, specifically software delivery pipelines using Jenkins and exploring different ways to validate software before deploying to an environment. Learning ways to incorporate my teams existing Continuous Integration jobs into a pipeline.

Honed my development skills by exploring new ways to test. Became interested in Inside Out testing and acceptance testing.

In 2014, I moved to a smaller team that allowed me to put testing ideas and CI/CD knowledge into practice by automating the full deployment of an application from code push to production deployment with automated verification along the way. Also, started to look into cloud computing in AWS.

Started at Manheim as an Associate Software Developer on a team that developed and maintained Ruby on Rails applications.

Learned Ruby on Rails, Agile development practices, software deployment methodologies, test driven development and many other valuable hard skills. Honed MySQL, frontend web development and Linux knowledge.

Learned how to work on a team and negotiate timelines between teams.

A web portfolio was built for Alex that he could manage by himself. The Secretary CMS was used for the backend and a simple design was used so that his work would standout.

Utilizing PHP and JQuery an infinite sliding portfolio site was created on top of a version of the Secretary CMS that was modified on the backend to meet Dan’s needs.

A logo and site design were created for an initiative Pearl was starting called Ornaments 4 Orphans iniative which. The was mainly informational with an shop section. A Worpress theme was created based on the design and the shop was implemented using a plugin.

I was the sole web developer managing an ecommerce site that averaged 70k visitors a month, along with two other properties with similar stats. To help manage design changes across 1k+ HTML pages I converted multiple sites from table based HTML to CSS with semantic HTML. Also, to improve effectiveness I drove the conversion from hand coded HTML to the Magento Shopping Cart System. I also created bi-weekly email campaigns that were sent out using MailChimp.