Hank Holiday

Badge List is the second startup I cofounded. As the technical half of the two-person founding team, I led and built the entirety of the platform. Badge List is a multi-tenant SaaS platform for creating and awarding digital badges that represent learning achievements. The platform is still growing and in active use by hundreds of organizations around the world.

The older bits of the platform come from a traditional Rails MVC monolith. The newer bits of the platform include a Rails-powered JSON API back end with a Polymer web component front end.

A couple of years back Virta was running into a scheduling problem. They were initially using Calendly to handle scheduling physician appointments. They needed to handle a Venn diagram of overlapping requirements: each doctor's licensed states, the physical location of the patient on the day of the call, the insurance restrictions of their employer, state-by-state regulatory requirements, and more.

After an exhaustive search to find what we needed among existing tools, we couldn't find a single one that met all of our requirements without forcing us to adopt some complicated, incompatible piece of software designed for a completely different use case. So over the course of about three months, I designed and built a completely custom scheduling engine that was built in native Salesforce that handled all of the complexity and added no recurring cost.

The resulting tool is called VirtaCal. We launched it with zero bugs and is still in use today. The front end is a streamlined scheduling UI. The backend pulls together information from the Google Calendar API and six different records in Salesforce and then executes the complex Venn diagram of logic needed to see which doctors are available for a given patient on a given day.

At the time, Airware was operating a geographically distributed fleet of drones and operators. All tracking was being done in spreadsheets which made it difficult to coordinate timing conflicts, verify maintenance, schedule repairs, and produce the paperwork necessary to maintain regulatory compliance.

The broader engineering team's solution was more than nine months out, so I single-handedly designed and built an interim solution in less than a month. That solution ended up being robust enough that it served as a key selling point and was still in use when the company was acquired two years later. The back end was built on top of Salesforce custom objects with a custom Apex-based REST API.

Knova is my startup's newest product. It is still in a pre-release stage, but it's been quite an undertaking to get it to this point.

Knova is a distributed learning data pipeline that can process millions of events per second, integrate with hundreds of business systems, and utilize machine learning APIs to scalably transform learning data into artifacts like digital badges. I've been responsible for working with our launch partners to define the initial feature set while also building out the long term strategy for the product. I've also architected the implementation, made all key technology decisions, and developed the design of each component of the system.

Under the hood, Knova is built on top of the Google Cloud Platform. We're using a microservices architecture which is language-agnostic (currently a mix of Ruby and Node.js). The services use gRPC to communicate directly and Google PubSub to communicate asynchronously. The public-facing gRPC services are then transcoded into restful JSON APIs to power web apps and vendor integrations.