Software Engineer

My first job out of university, and the one that set the standard I've measured engineering against since.

Wikipedia search in Blogger

I independently led and delivered the integration of Wikipedia search into Blogger, letting writers find and reference source material without leaving the editor. It shipped to thousands of blogs and reached millions of readers, and it earned an Exceptional Performance Award.

Owning a launch end to end that early was the useful part: scoping it, building it, and being the person answerable for it afterwards.

Internal tools

Most of the rest of my time went into tools for teams inside Google:

• A web app for analysing customer reviews and generating reports.
• A web app supporting the quarterly sales quota-setting process.
• A Chrome extension for internal security testing of ads.

None of these were glamorous, and all of them removed real, recurring drag from teams doing operational work. Building internal tools also teaches you something external products rarely do — your users are down the hall, and they will tell you exactly what's wrong with it.