being the wandering toolmaker

After being an senior-ish software engineer and a team lead (like a tech lead elsewhere) for five years, I was the first "wandering toolmaker" at NoRedInk. In this role, I spent about half of my time working on the product (mostly focused on improving life for ELA teachers and their students) and the remainder working on improving tooling and developer experience for the department and company.

This included projects like:

• adding Sorbet to our Rails monolith and getting almost all (over 95%) of our code to typed: true levels of checking.
• converting all our CoffeeScript code to JavaScript, then to TypeScript, and integrating it with the port-based FFI in Elm.
• creating tools to help our accessibility team educate the company how to make our site more accessible
• exploring alternate build tools like rbt