Software Products
Chewy Prescriptions | Senior Front End Engineer @ Chewy.com
The overall performance was increased ~83% which is clearly seen in the above video displaying side by side load times before and after the rewrite. Take note that the header now loads asynchronously to the page content.
The My Prescriptions page on Chewy.com is where pet parents are able to view and renew their pet’s prescriptions. It is a core part of the pharmacy experience on the website, but its performance was poor when my team inherited ownership of the page in 2022. One of my main goals for 2023 was to improve the user experience of the initial page load, as users on slow internet connections were seeing load times of up to 13 seconds. This was no easy task. The legacy code was written within an internal abandoned framework architecture, which was originally used to wrap the actual page content alongside the Chewy header and footer among 3 sibling applications. In order to obtain these significant improvements we needed to surgically remove the legacy React code from this wrapper framework and put it into its own Single Page Application. I achieved this by removing all legacy synchronous code on the front end, and imported the Header and Footer as client side rendered asynchronous components which also effectively eliminated page layout shifting with the use of skeleton loaders. I also took the opportunity to update the page to our new visual design system, incorporated SCSS modules, removed superfluous DOM nodes, and improved our Google Analytics implementation. The developer experience was also greatly improved too, as the new code only spanned one repository (no more mounting a repo within another) and included dev boxes for testing.
Performance Improvements
Chewy Wholesale Pharmacy | Senior Front End Engineer @ Chewy.com
Since 2021 I have supported Chewy’s Wholesale Pharmacy program, which allows vet clinics to sell their medications directly on Chewy.com. As a Senior Front End Engineer my work has revolved around making sure the path to purchase for clinic sold prescriptions is as user friendly as possible, with a desired goal of increasing clinic revenue. Sitting on top of pivotal path to purchase flows, the features surrounding Wholesale Pharmacy were built with full accessibility and A11y web standards in mind. I created buy boxes, multiple informational landing pages, badging, and info drawers to further explain the Wholesale Pharmacy program. As the program touches multiple pages across Chewy.com, it required a great deal of collaboration with other teams, including product pages, cart, and checkout. Code was also required to be written and connected to multiple different languages and frameworks (React.js, Vue.js, JSP) as Chewy allows individual teams to choose their own architecture. The Buy From Your Vet Box portion of the feature went through many design iterations, before landing on what is shown below.
One of multiple informational drawers on the site.
The enhanced BuyBox component with your vet clinic preselected when viewing a pharmacy product. There is a good amount of behind the scenes logic to make this component as performant as possible due to it being present on heavily viewed product pages. Some things we did to make this possible was: server side rendering the component, created a caching layer so the box did not need to re-render when a different product variant was selected, screen reader and voice testing to meet accessibility standards.
Connect With a Vet | Senior Front End Engineer @ Chewy.com
As the Coronavirus began to impact the availability and accessibility of vet visits in March 2020, my 5 person team at Chewy Pet Health pivoted our 2020 roadmap to build out the first iteration of Chewy’s Connect With a Vet tele-triage service. This was a high priority project for the company due to the difficulty in obtaining vet appointments because of coronavirus restrictions as well as an overall increase in pet adoptions that swamped most vet offices for the year. As a Senior Front End Engineer I actively worked on the mobile responsive UI in Vue.js for the chewy.com side of scheduling an appointment, as well as building out informational landing pages. Part of that work involved integrating the front end with an Oracle database that was able to take in user’s pet and vet information so that a customer service representative could connect the user with an appropriate on call vet. From March to May of 2020, our team worked at a rapid pace collaborating with multiple teams across our organization to release the feature in less than two months to all chewy.com autoship users. Within the first day of launching Connect With a Vet, a user called in with a dog who had an undiagnosed blood clot and we were able to connect them with their local emergency room who was able to save the dog’s life! The first iteration of the feature was a text only appointment, but has since expanded to video appointments as well. I’ve even used the feature myself when my dog ate my camera SD card, d’oh!
Current iteration of the Connect With a Vet feature on Chewy.com
AWE USA ‘19 | UI Engineer, UX Designer, iOS Developer @ AFFOA
AWE USA 2019 was the official app of the 10th annual Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara, California. The goal of the app was to increase networking at the conference. Besides displaying useful conference information, the app focused around a feature that allowed attendees to display business card information in AR on top of their official individualized conference swag bags. Attendees and exhibitors were also able to connect and message each other by tapping on users’ AR avatars. Each exhibitor was also given a data package that logged the users that attended their booths. As the UI Engineer on this project I designed the entire user experience for both Android and iOS, helped develop the iOS version of the application, and created a realtime scoreboard for attendees to keep track of their “networking” rank at the conference. Throughout the course of the conference the app received an over 80% download rate across 7,000 attendees and 250 exhibitors.
Me standing in front of one of the scoreboard displays posted throughout the conference. For every ten in-app connections made one tree was planted.
Form Management System (FMS) | FrontEnd Software Engineer @ GE
Form Management System, or FMS, was an internal GE software product built to help increase the ease of form creation and form completion for GE mechanics and technicians. The application consisted of both a drag and drop web app for creating, testing, and storing forms and a mobile app for filling out and submitting forms in the field. The app was built and designed to adhere to GE’s main style guide. A fun feature was the creation of conditional form logic that allowed for previously very verbose forms to dynamically shrink and grow based off of the user’s inputs. The app was also able to be used offline for remote field operations. As a FrontEnd Software Engineer on this project I worked closely with the UX team to create new FrontEnd components that could be reused throughout GE’s company wide component library.
Personal Projects
BackScratch | Creative Director, Full Stack-Engineer
BackScratch is a native mobile app that provides a social networking platform for users to trade skills and services within their local community. Built with React-Native, backScratch handles a potentially cumbersome application state by using Redux to create an immutable state for easy scalability. On the back-end backScratch utilizes a neo4j graph database in order to oversee user interaction.
Foodigi | Product Owner, Full Stack-Engineer
Foodigi is a web app for mobile devices that directs users to the nearest restaurant that serves their desired food. Built using Facebook's javascript framework, React, foodigi utilizes your phone's internal compass and gyroscope to render a native HTML compass component. The compass will then dynamically point to the closest restaurant by pulling proximity based results form YELP.
Check out the code here: https://github.com/polarbasin/foodigi
BORED? | Full Stack-Engineer
BORED? is a local event aggregator that populates itself from various New Orleans based event and news feeds. The web app also allows for users to sign in with Facebook authentication and add their own events to the main feed.
Check out the code here: https://github.com/polarbasin/nolaBored
Grow | Software Engineer
Grow is a relaxing browser based video game. Use the arrow keys to move a rain drop. Water the grass below you while avoiding clouds. Grow is designed to specifically use only one JavaScript library, D3.js, as an experiment and challenge to push the library to its limits.
Check out the code here: https://github.com/GlaserD/Grow
Evacuspot Locator | UX Designer
Evacuspot Locator is an addition to a current web application built by the City of New Orleans that assists the community during hurricane evacuations. This proposed feature aggregates official city evacuation locations and displays route directions along with vital hurricane information. This feature was built at Open Source NOLA Hackathon 2016 and won 1st prize. The concept was then incorporated into the official City of New Orleans web site later that year.
Check out the code here: https://github.com/GlaserD/evacuspot_locator