Harrison Strowd

SoundBYTE is a Twitter-like app that allows users to share and follow sound clips instead of text snippets. It supports many of the same features as Twitter and other social media services (e.g. following users, tagging posts, and more).

On this project, I stepped into an existing Rails back-end service for this app and was asked to extend it to support the following set of features, completing the initial set of capabilities for the app:

• Support for users to reset their passwords.
• Support for flagging users, posts, and comments as inappropriate.
• Support for creating and following hashtags.
• Support for assigning hashtags to posts.
• Support for retrieving a users "feed" of posts (i.e. those for the users and tags they are following).

At Belly, we built a great in-store loyalty platform for SMB merchants, but had never made the jump to integrate this service into a merchant's eCommerce platform to deliver the same great loyalty capabilities for online orders. Later after reviewing the major platforms and their plugin support capabilities, I selected WooCommerce to rectify this.
WooCommerce was the right choice for a number reasons:

1. Adoption: it powers a staggering number of eCommerce sites.
2. Flexibility: it is built on top of WordPress which is entirely open source and very customizable. This gave us great flexibility in how we integrated the Belly loyalty functionality into the eCommerce workflow.
3. Maintainability: we had some front-end engineers with PHP experience who could maintain and extend this plugin if necessary.
4. Cost: WooCommerce was free to get up and running.
I managed both sides of this integration. I began by standing up a dedicated instance of our loyalty platform and using our Apigee service to expose a sensible set of API endpoints for use. I then jumped over to the WooCommerce side of things and created an initial WordPress plugin to implement the integration of our loyalty capabilities into any given WooCommerce site.

Pearachute is a service that allows parents to drop their kids into various courses and events around their city. The original service was developed using an off-the-shelf Python scheduling framework, but later ported over to Rails and the original development team was no longer involved in the project.

I joined the engineering team to provide ongoing full-stack development support. I helped build out key new features, perform maintenance on the existing application, and pay down areas of technical debt within the system. The following are a few of the key initiatives I worked on:

• HubSpot Integration Refactor: consolidated our integration points with HubSpot and to provide a simplified facade for our application to use when interacting with this service.
• ActiveAdmin Performance Improvements: cleaned up a number of inefficient queries in our ActiveAdmin configuration, significantly improving performance and usability.
• Facebook Sign-Ups: integrated an authentication via Facebook into our standard sign-up workflow, capturing the necessary account information from users that sign up through this channel.

Technologies: Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, React, Devise, OmniAuth, ActiveAdmin, Hubspot, Stripe, Capistrano, AWS.