VMWare Pivotal Labs

đź’Ľ experience

I worked at Pivotal Labs (bought by VMware in 2020, now called VMware Pivotal Labs) from August 2017 - January 2021. Pivotal Labs is a software consultancy focused on Agile and XP digital transformations for our clients. For me, consulting is about knowing when to be teaching and when to be listening.

Experience

Engineering leader of teams of up to 10 software engineers, onboarding new members, mentoring others, facilitating decision-making, and representing the team needs to stakeholders.

Designed and built greenfield applications and REST APIs, and worked in legacy codebases, in React, Java, Node, Kotlin, Angular, Python, and Vue.js.

Trained and taught client developers in Extreme Programming (XP) principles and practices, including pair programming, test-driven development (TDD), and Lean UX practices. Pair programmed 8 hours / day. Wrote unit, integration, contract, & end-to-end automated test suites.

Supported product managers maintaining a backlog, and supported designers through user research and product ideation, providing a technical lens and feasibility voice to decision-making. Expert at communicating technical ideas to non-technical collaborators. Skilled consultant in stakeholder management, facilitation, cross-functional communication.

Created and managed CI/CD pipelines in Jenkins, CircleCI, TravisCI, Gitlab, TeamCity, and Concourse that enable Agile teams to confidently release quality software to production.

Mentored client engineers to be XP evangelists in their own companies. Led workshops to 30+ engineers teaching SOLID principles. Mentored and coached senior client engineers.

A handful of projects

Medicare enrollment portal

Vue.js Node TypeScript .NET mySQL

  • Championed refactoring for the team, including “code clean-up Fridays”. Taught behavior-driven testing practices. Introduced domain-driven design principles.

React Node TypeScript PostgreSQL

  • Built a user-facing tool for unemployed New Jerseyans to find training/certification programs backed by a PostgreSQL text search engine. Was in production in four weeks.
  • Being the sole engineer, made all full-stack technical decisions for the product.
    Trained a replacement engineer for handoff of the entire codebase. Handled stakeholder technical communications, and contributed with PMs and designers to product roadmap & backlog.

Prescription-tracking software for pharmacists

Java Spring

  • Advised on and implemented architectural decisions in microservice distributed architecture. Refactored domain boundary decisions and message queue structure.
  • Improved end-to-end test runtime from 10min to 40sec.

Consumer retail online return application

React Kotlin TypeScript mySQL

  • Led the team through getting an app in production within one week.
  • Created a CI/CD pipeline for trunk-based development with blue/green deploys.
  • Mentored client engineers into TDD/XP advocates and thought leaders in their company.
  • Proposed and handled compromises with collaborating technology teams.

Knowledge Management tool for lawyers

React Java Spring ElasticSearch

  • Led engineering on a team of 10 - mentored other engineers, facilitated tech decisions, ran psychological safety workshops, ran meetings with difficult external stakeholders.
  • Built a search engine on ElasticSearch, and taught it to the rest of the engineering team.

Notes mentioning this note

Consulting as a Co-Creation Conversation
Systems Thinking & Software Practices
Pair Programming