Ladder was a small company, 4 people when I started, that made child care business management software.

The engineering team started out with only 2 of us and that grew to 6 by the time I moved on. I was very privileged to work on a wide variety of technical and management problems while I was there. Here’s just a few of the things I worked on.

Service-based Refactoring

The application structure made it quite difficult to maintain. The logic was encoded in sometimes giant procedural controller methods or stored procedures. The procedures meant that distinct features implemented many times, sometimes in contradictory ways. Some of the identical features were also spread over 3 applications.

We were able to address this with a service-based architecture on the server side. We grouped logics related to individual features into their own services and methods. Part of this was migrating complex stored procedures into smaller LINQ queries. With these two techniques, over several years we were able to make some big improvements.

jQuery -> Angular

The original application was built in ASP.NET MVC with jQuery on the client side. Over my time there we received more requests for complex client side features. We already had Angular in the code base, so it was a natural solution for complex client side logic. We were able to move some of our more complex jQuery pages into Angular. This made a big difference in maintenance.

Database Optimization

During my time at Ladder the customer base grew quite a bit. Some of the application’s database interactions didn’t scale well with the data. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the resources to change data-access patterns. I spent a lot of time optimizing queries, indexes and adjusting infrastructure.

I was able to leverage a couple things to our advantage. I adjusted where-clauses and joins to take best advantage of indexes. I implemented some of Ola Hallengren’s (https://ola.hallengren.com/) scripts for auto-optimization. I also adjusted indexes as necessary.

Team Lead

As our team grew, I had the role of team leader. I enjoyed helping other devs and advocated for them. I spent quite a bit of one-on-one time with our team. I would onboard the new devs and mentor the junior ones. I would discuss solutions with the more experienced ones.

I also helped in recruiting and performance evaluation. I would perform the second screening for engineering candidates and attend final interviews. As it came up, I would discuss performance with co-workers throughout the year. Once a year, I would provide a performance evaluation to our management team.

Project Management

As the company grew, project management suffered. We didn’t have enough resources for a full time PM, so I filled the gap. I spent quite a bit of time doing requirements, prioritization, planning and communication.

We started by managing via a support person’s notebook. By the time I handed off my responsibility to a PM, we were using a dedicated project management software.

You can check them out at https://runsandbox.com

The Sunlab does solar panel research and testing. They have a lot of field sensors that each had its own manual control and data collection method. I spent a summer organizing data and creating a master control application. The control application was a single software that interfaced with all their sensors. One of the big challenges with this project was writing all the custom device interfaces.

I spent a summer migrating a Microsoft Access application to a web application. It was a long time ago, that’s about all I remember.