👋 Hey, Planning Center! I'm David.
We last chatted a couple of years ago, back in April 2017.
Here's my cover letter from then - except for my current position, everything else still applies!
Since we last talked...
I've gained some "team lead" experience. A couple months after my interview with Dan and Zack, my team lead moved to another team, and eventually stepped away from the company. Our VP of Engineering and our team's PM allowed me to step into the team lead role, working with a team of two or three developers and a QA engineer. We worked together to implement several new features, overhaul a few backend components, and implement a site-wide UI refresh.
I moved to a new position. Early last year, our parent company was acquired, which ended up putting our (subsidiary) company specifically in a bit of a bind. I started seeing the writing on the wall that my product was not going to get the financial attention we thought it deserved (one of my first clues was when the budget was cut to the point where I was the only engineer left on the team), so I began looking for a new position. Last November, I made the move to a startup based in SF, as a remote Full Stack Web Developer. We're in the middle of converting the seven-year-old codebase to a React front-end, which means dealing with a lot of tech-debt in addition to a major refactor!
I started freelancing on the side. My wife told me I couldn't start my own LLC until I found a client who was willing to pay me...so I did! It's been fun to lend a hand on other codebases, spin a few apps up from scratch, and exercise some of my "design" chops on simple web sites. (I've managed to only do one WordPress site, and I decided to try to avoid it from now on!)
I still love learning and experimenting. Since an early age, I've been fascinated with weather, and my most of my recent side-projects have been weather-focused. The National Weather Service is notoriously behind-the-times technology-speaking, but they do have a surprisingly decent API that I've been exploring. Before I discovered the newer APIs, I built a Nokogiri scraper to grab a bunch of text data, clean up their ugly embedded formatting, and build a dashboard to display the (cleaner!) products. Swapping out the HTML scraper for API calls was fairly easy to do, but the formatter is still very useful!
I've also been playing with Mapbox.js, as an alternative to embedded Google Maps. My first project with Mapbox was born out of last winter's "Seattle Snowpocalypse": being a fairly techie part of the country, several of our local governments have a pretty vast network of traffic cameras. Some display them in friendlier ways (e.g. responsive Google Maps) than others (e.g. Flash-based desktop-only maps), so I decided to combine them all into one easy-to-use map, specifically to keep track of road conditions during the snow event. After sharing it with a few friends and neighbors, the page ended up getting upwards of a couple hundred views a day during the height of the storm!
More recently, I've been converting NWS shapefiles into GeoJSON, and displaying the info in interactive layers on a Mapbox base map. My next project is to ingest and convert the files in the background, to display real-time information such as the Watches / Warnings / Advisories products.
I'd love the chance to talk with you again!
Sure, I was disappointed that I didn't make the cut last time. But Romans 8:28 and Jeremiah 29:11 were true then, and are still true today.
And in a way, I'm thankful I didn't get the job them, because I've learned a lot about myself in these last two-plus years. Stepping into the team lead role gave me a glimpse into the world of management, with the safety-net of a leadership team who were more than willing to mentor and give me the space to learn on my own. It also whet my appetite for putting myself in a position to move down that track.
Working with a startup has been an interesting experience, to say the least! I've learned that I absolutely love getting to work from home - not having a 2+ hour commute each day means more time spent with my wife and daughter, and the flexibility to take my daughter to or from school has been amazing for our family. But I've also learned that I'm not cut out for the startup world long-term - something I could only learn by being a part of one!
Because of the experiences I've had, I believe I'm a much stronger person now - and I think I'd make a great addition to the Planning Center team.
Everything I said about you last time I applied still rings true - you're set up on a solid foundation (both spiritually and historically), and you're laser-focused on your customers and your team. Professionally, I'd love to be on a larger team, with more diversity in products and people. I'm passionate about working on products that make a difference in people's lives, and I can't think of a better way to do that than to help local churches advance their ministries.
