Gridpoint / 2013-2014
At Gridpoint I got a change of pace from the big dot coms and worked as a Front-End Engineer for the system management portal supporting the company's flagship line of smart-grid energy monitoring hardware as part of a much (much) smaller satellite team of the main Virginia office.
As the front-end lead for the project I inherited I managed remote employees and oversees contractors working to update the aging product for the 21st century. The work was generally hampered by resource constraints, made more difficult by the lack of presence from the main body of engineers across the country, and the "seller's market" for developer talent at the time. Still we soldiered on and produced several key integration features for the new generation hardware, as well as some nice creature comfort features like expanded chart views and analytics.
The mission of the company is really pretty great. It's like Nest for enterprise customers with large buildings, warehouses, and the like to keep in order. Not only could the systems operate remotely, tracking energy usage analytics, temperature, pressure, humidity, etc., the engine crunching the numbers could make predictions on the health status of things like commercial HVAC units, lighting, or irrigation systems, providing operators with warnings when something unusual was happening in an area and suggesting solutions or improvements to maximize energy efficiency and lower costs at the same time. It was a really cool project!
Over time however, as deadlines loomed and our resources dwindled, my team and I made heroic efforts to implement at migration strategy for the old system (run on Flash) to the new JVM solution. Unfortunately, rapid shifts in upper management caused many of us to grow concerned with the viability of the company, and several of my team, myself included, left Gridpoint after only a year to seek more temperate climes.
Gridpoint.com Circa 2016