May, 2016 - Bluxome Labs

(Bluxome Labs : 4/16-4/16)

In a unique position given my previous experience with the UX, I took an opportunity when tasked by Product and Design to not only reskin the Listing but also to upgrade it.

Given that no one besides me really knew how RequireJS was working in the application and given its falling-out-of-favor in the general community as a module-loading solution, it was time to upgrade it to Webpack.

Here’s what the Task Listing looked like before

Here’s the mock from Design

In chronological order, here’s what I did

Upgraded DataTables from 1.9 to 1.10
Refactored JavaScript towards more of an OO paradigm
Applied new skin
Ported JavaScript for RequireJS to CoffeeScript for Webpack
Deployed

…and here’s what I delievered

Results

Successfully advocated for adoption of Webpack to replace RequireJS and then ported most-trafficked page, while achieveing near-pixel-perfect re-skinning.

Bluxome Labs : 4/16-4/16)

Test Questions have long been the quality assurance mechanism of the CrowdFlower platform.

The interactivity behind them was created around 2008 in MooTools as part of a Merb application; that interactivity was never ported, even as the company increasingly adopted Rails and jQuery. For over three years, discussion has been of porting the Test Question interface out of Merb (the last presentation-layer in that app) and into a company-standard Rails app. Given the expected amount of effort with little user-benefitting ROI to be realized for simply a straight port, it’s easy to understand why it had only ever remained a discussion.

Finally, in April, 2016, the stars aligned when the VP of Product expressed a desire to spend time on improving Test Questions usability while the VP of Engineering decided the time was right for moving forward on a micro-service architecture, dividing “frontend” and “backend” responsibilities accordingly. I seized on the opportunity (without being mandated to do so) because I saw that we could kill two birds with one stone

Following is an inventory (I created the initial format for) of JS libs across three different routes (completed by a junior engineer)

I then used this inventory in conjunction with a Jira report to help scope the effort and parcel out work to likely candidates, an example of which can be seen below

Finally, I tracked progress in a wiki page, providing status updates to key stakeholders.

Results

Laid groudwork for complete FE overhaul, including success criteria and risks, after shopping technical ideas around with Lead engineers, VP PROD, VP ENGR.