Projects

PDFGen

• Transitioned the Cyber Risk Assessment (CRA) document generation process from legacy microservice PDFGen to a new microservice called cyber-lifecycle that utilized Temporal in order to asynchronously and resiliently generate documents
  • Converted most calls made from webserver to be routed to cyber-lifecycle
  • Providing a way of generating CRAs asynchronously, the user does not need to stare as the webpage waits for the document to be generated
• Moved several functionalities to the new and preferred microservices docgen and docstore. For example:
  • Expanded how docstore responds to events by adding the ability to emit a DocumentStored and DocumentFailed event, depending on the situation
  • Add the ability to extract individual pages from PDFs to expand the functionality for docstore

Fiduciary and Crime Documents

• Added crime and fiduciary to the possible coverages that can be added in docgen, the documents team new and preferred microservice for generating documents
• Ran a script to add fiduciary and crime coverages to newly created (and some older) template and variant documents to make sure the launch of said coverages went off without a hitch

Templates synchronization observability across environments

• Made the results of the observability script the culled data across different environments more human-readable by adding a step in the script to convert the results into an HTML table

Quote Creation Automation Document Validation

1. Took ownership of full epic for the creation of a script that automates the creation of quotes
   1. Led other devs (Kenny and Rushabh) in coordinating the work that needs to be done
   2. Spoke with Junior PM (Divya) and users (Support Engineers) about their needs and requirements
      1. Created cards around said requirements
   3. Coordinated with other teams (Dave Koston) about the information we would need to implement the requirements fully
2. Created a spike document and led team discussion over design decisions
3. Disambiguated what was needed to make the script
   1. I went a step further and created a GUI all by myself, despite not committing to that originally in the Spike doc 🥳
      1. It seemed best to have a GUI as opposed to a simple script since members outside our team, for example, Jonathan Tighe, would be using the script.
      2. The possible cost would have been the amount of time spent trying to get the GUI working, but by selecting PySimpleGUI, I cut the time to edit and create a GUI to within a day.

Move all context generation into doc-context

1. Executed a new process for creating new services that had several parts that needed to be clarified
   1. Worked with Mohnish on the platform team to learn and implement the new terragrunt way of creating infrastructure in AWS
2. Learned a lot in the process about how the infrastructure team works
3. Had to coordinate and clarify what the requirements were from a senior engineer (Lara Shores)
   1. Then had to figure out how to implement them with the help of Mohnish
4. This led to my drafting a proposal for the infrastructure team on ways of bidirectionally improving their relationship with other developer teams since I saw some inefficiencies in how other developers understood, used, and consumed their tools

Doc-Management

• Made several UI improvements to an internal tool called doc-management to improve how the Support Engineers work and created a better user experience for them

Collaboration & mentorship

• Helped a lot in improving our teams' processes which resulted in my writing up several documents
• Have become the go-to person for many questions about our system
• Have become the go-to person when anyone on the doc-support team needs something to get done now
• Led meetings about:
  • Code Comments
  • PR Review Process
  • Code Quality Improvements
• Mentored three different coding bootcamp graduates simultaneously
  • Two received jobs at the end of the mentoring process

What you learned

Concepts and Books

Read several books:

Title	Key Takeaways
Pragmatic Programmer	Provided a framework for professional software engineering practices.
Software Engineering at Google	Offered deep insights into software engineering as a discipline distinct from programming, with valuable lessons on team culture.
Building Microservices by Sam Newman	Directly applicable to my work with microservices, with many 1:1 correlations to real-world scenarios.
Designing Data-Intensive Applications By: Martin Kleppmann	A dense but essential read that provided the vocabulary and mental models for reasoning about system design.
Staff Engineer By: Will Larson

Cloud Computing and IaC

• Picked up and learned AWS and GCP
  • And then got certified in both with the following certifications:
    • AWS Developer Associate (January 2022)
    • GCP Cloud Engineer (February 2022)
  • Took what I learned in AWS and applied it to my job
    • Became one of the key people who managed and set up our infrastructure at V Studios
• Picked up Terraform in order to help the rest of my team address gaps in knowledge when communicating with the platform team at V! Studios (and as a result, also became a key person on the Documents team at Coalition)
  • Completed a full course on Terraform: https://courses.morethancertified.com/p/mtc-terraform (focused on real-life projects over memorization)

Libraries and Tools

• Learned and deep-dived into async in Python and several different libraries, like aiohttp, and went through the walkthrough by Lynn Root, Staff Engineer at Spotify.
  • Spent a lot of time going through different libraries' documentation
  • And subscribed to a newsletter series that explained async in Python
• Picked up and learned
  • FastAPI
  • pipenv
  • Angular (for fun)
• Learned and used at my job Sphinx and reStructured Text
  • Created the rst docs for the project I was on and set up all the tools needed to run and maintain Spinx
• GraphQL
  • Created two different GraphQL backends in two different languages
    • Typescript: https://github.com/danyeric123/boilerplate-graphql-server
    • Python: https://github.com/danyeric123/graphene-book-api—and implemented in a larger personal project https://github.com/danyeric123/Ecommerce
• gRPC
  • Went through the gRPC demo for Python
  • Sam Newman's book helped a lot, especially Chapter 4 on encoding
  • Deep dive into interceptors in gRPC
  • Applied what I learned at work

Programming Language

• Golang: made a simple Go backend, https://github.com/danyeric123/go-bookserver, packaging it in Docker and all 😀 and jumped into a large Golang codebase at Coalition and starting working in it within a couple of days
• Bash—I have gotten really into Bash scripts 😜
  • I have created several bash scripts both for work and for my personal use
    • One key example would be my setup script—it cut my developer setup down from a couple of days to literal minutes

Other

• Got a deeper knowledge of git
  • Specifically got more comfortable fixing all the different git mistakes you could make!
• Got introduced to and gained a better understanding of distributed traces
  • Specifically got familiarized with DataDog
    • Went through several of DataDog's tutorials and workshops (many focused on JS specific implementation)
• Helped a lot in improving our teams' processes which resulted in my writing up several documents

GraphQL: The Good, The Bad, and The Bottomline

Personal Life

• Relearned how to walk after reconstructive surgery on my left foot