Peter Toth

As a senior Ruby back-end engineer at Pagantis, I led efforts to emphasize the non-functional requirements and form a culture of continuous improvements, which resulted in adopting continuous delivery.

My contributions and outcomes were the following:
• Introduced the end-to-end and integration tests, which included reducing the fault rate to increase experimentation, more code cleanups for faster development, and business domain level documentation.
• Adopted the trunk-based development that resulted in 5x more deploys, smaller deployment batch size causing faster code reviews and bug hunts, and reduced lead and cycle time.
• Implemented the feature switches and traffic routers that improved risk management, reduced mean time to recovery, increased the encouragement for experimentation, and reduced the deployment batch size.
• Introduced live metrics such as understanding users and product internals through a visual representation, new and easy validations of our actions, focus on outcome over the output, situational awareness, and rapid error detection.

As a software engineer at Pagantis, I led the replacement of our in-house online payment service, leveraging an external provider for the QueBueno product.

The challenges:
• Little room for errors when dealing with customers’ money.
• The legacy and complex core system with limited documentation.
• Maintenance and update challenges of the restrictive legacy system.
• No test environment for internal payment system.

My contributions:
• Identified the milestones and organized work to measure progress and reduce risk.
• Introduced metrics to validate updates and ensure a seamless transition between systems.
• Integrated a new payment service provider to the core system applying all business rules.
• Configured the payment gateways in the new service provider system.
• Built a traffic router to minimize any failure during the migration and reduce cost by choosing the proper payment gateway.

The entire transition took two months, resulting in high business and customer satisfaction. We reduced operation costs and improved the UX.

Time Manager is a single-page web application to manage working hours and tasks. I started this hobby project to practice building the SPAs.

The app contains user management, different permission levels, and business rules. The emphasis is placed on rich front-end functionalities to improve UX. The back end is the JSON API powered by Ruby on Rails (RoR), while the front end is the Ember.js app using Bootstrap and Sass. The demo is deployed to S3 and a free Heroku dyno. The zero-downtime deployment is achieved; it has a quick rollback and canary versions in production. The app uses the JSON API specification to format the JSON responses to unify the back and front end communication. It has automated tests to cover the core functionalities and reach a given level of confidence.