Living happily where leadership and software development meet, I can give the best of both worlds. 10 years of experience in software engineering across the entire stack, including DevOps practices, gives me a wealth of technical information to build the best, scalable, most cost-efficient solution for you.
Some career highlights:
I'm self-taught on almost all of my technical skills, and have gone through numerous leadership trainings to hone my management and coaching abilities. I always strive to be better through feedback loops, continuing education, and building my network.
Angela Duckworth writes in her book Grit, "most of your actions derive their significance from their allegiance to your ultimate concern, your life philosophy." This sent me on a journey to find my life philosophy, something that gave me drive and passion. Fortunately, it didn't take long to find it.
This may be in individual growth, or it may be in the form of a product. This is why I work at the cross-section of engineering and leadership. This is why I am passionate about understanding people, about helping others grow.
I work hard to create a team culture that promotes honesty, trust, healthy conflict, and both the growth of the team and the individual. I believe that people are at the heart of everything, and as the most valuable asset a company can have, should be treated with respect and encouragement.
There are many things that make a team great, but there are three that rise to the top, trust, communication, and emotional intelligence. These traits within a team bring out the best in people, resulting in healthy debates and new ideas. Everyone comes from a different background, a different culture, and it is important to ensure that everyone is heard, that everyone is taken seriously.
Things like "healthy conflict" and "emotional intelligence" aren't something easy to learn, they must be experienced and continuously studied. I coach team members through various topics like emotional literacy and mindful living. These skills combined with something I like to call deliberate work*, create an empowered and growing environment.
Teams that lack trust are incapable of engaging in unfiltered and passionate debate of ideas. Instead, they resort to veiled discussions and guarded comments.
Technology has always been a love of mine for as long as I can remmeber. Remember in the 90s, when families had a "computer room," where their bulky PC with CRT monitor were stored? I remember as a child I was fascinated with the CD drive. I couldn't figure out how it worked. So, what did little Logan do? I formed Play-Doh into a disk and tried to cram it in the drive to see how the drive interacted with the Play-Doh. (Something about being able to see the striations? 5-year-old logic.) This, of course, ruined the drive, and the mystery eluded me.
I've kept that same spirit of curiosity (albeit, much less destructive) throughout my life. I have honed my learning agility so that I may pick up new frameworks and languages with ease. This allows me to quickly pick something up, and build things that previously were not possible.
Everything I know has been self-taught, and I continue to push the barrier every day.
As my peer, or really anytime you're on a team with me, you can expect a few things.
I manage the DevOps and Platform Engineering teams for HealthVerity.
I've worked hand-in-hand with our project managers and PMO to create sustainable processes for our DevOps team. I also led culture changes from both a team and department level for better documentation, observability, and growth by presenting best practices, giving regular feedback, and making these things part of our every day.
The Platform Engineering team is also responsible for building internal tooling to delight our engineers and help them stay productive by abstracting away inter-service connections, standardizing CI/CD flows, project structure, and communication. We accomplish this through the use of AWS CDK and our proprietary L3 constructs.
We managed HealthVerity's AWS infrastructure through IAC such as Terraform, AWS CDK, and even raw CloudFormation.
Highlights
I lead the ecommerce engineering team, made up of 9+ engineers in both North America and across the world. Together, we build and maintain Cricut.com. We work with product managers, marketing teams, creative design teams, and our follow engineers to provide a world-class ecommerce experience.
As a team, we have integrated additional payment gateways, increased deliverability of online orders through verification steps, expanded internationally in both product selection and currency, and supported a very large subscription business.
As a leader, among other things, I have worked to define change management processes, build a team culture that promotes growth and trust, and build (and improve!) daily processes to ensure a reliable, swift software development cycle. I work with our technical recruiters to screen and interview candidates, both for technical skill and team culture fit.
Some other highlights
I was a part of our Magento software engineering team, where we manage Cricut's Magento 2 eCommerce site and all the integrations that go with it. We work with product managers, marketing teams, creative design teams, and our follow engineers to provide a world-class ecommerce experience.
I managed a small team of developers, including the team workload, day-to-day tasks, communication with other departments, and mediating between people when necessary.
I was also involved with interviewing prospective employees and helping make decisions on how to build and grow the team. These decisions often included factors such as technical ability, culture fit, and how well the employee in question could work with others in the broader team.
My team built cricut.com, was in charge of updating and maintaining the content on shop.cricut.com, and is responsible for coding the email newsletters and campaigns that go out to our consumers. I also managed the Cricut Learn site and Help
I joined the front-end engineering team in the Creative department in April 2016. Our team collaborates closely with direct-to-consumer (DTC) marketing, UX, Visual Design, channel marketing, and product teams.
My first large project was helping finish the build for the Cricut Help Center on Drupal 8. My role was primarily front-end, building on the theme that was there. Afterwards, I worked with the product team to come up with the Learn site, which, with the help of a custom module, provides users with “playlists” of tutorials so people can learn how to use their Cricut machine and the accessories that come with it.
In June 2016, I was placed as the project lead on the Criuct.com rebuild project. We were responsible for transitioning cricut.com from Sitefinity 5.4 to Drupal 7. This involved a large content migration, a custom theme, and a custom site build.
My team’s primary function is to update our ecommerce site with the latest promotions and creative, maintain cricut.com, and code the email newsletters to blast out to our subscribing consumers. We are expected to work under tight timelines and be flexible in our work.
Built 4 custom Drupal modules and an Omega sub-theme for the revamping of veteransadvantage.com. Integrated 3rd party APIs and a webhook listener into Drupal.
Building client's websites, creating Drupal themes, build new products, answer support tickets.
Assisted in building a plan to migrate their current site, framework, and functionality over to Drupal.
Designed websites using Joomla! from PSD files. Also used WordPress and custom-built websites. Used PHP, AJAX, HTML/HTML5, CSS/CSS3, JavaScript, jQuery
Worked on various Drupal sites; rebuilt the CRM