Stephen Prockow

Aptiv | Senior Frontend Developer

Jan 2021 - Present

Senior front-end developer delivering UI for Aptiv's connected services platform. Proposed and architected shared component library to modernize suite of existing products.

• Hired to help at-risk migration project. Proposed and implemented logging integration with DataDog. Immediately useful in identifying problems, and served as a template for other projects to add observability to their products.
• Resolved blocking bug due to computationally expensive data-viz. App crashes dropped from ~1400 a week to < 10 a month. Decrease the time required to render data by ~65% for templates with 8 or more graphs.

• Asked to start front-end development on new dashboard product. Architected solution as a monorepo component library, which allowed team to break down project into smaller internal stakeholder releases (Storybook, diagnostic tools, internal apps), before public launch
• Initiated effort to track/increase test coverage using Jest framework
• Github Actions powered CI/CD pipeline allows us to deliver UI through multiple channels: Standalone web apps + shared component libraries
• Monorepo has allowed us to pursue incremental UX improvement for a legacy Java-based monolith web app via a Micro-Frontend strategy (embedded web components delivered via a CDN).
• Published our first cross-team shared React component to our private node package repository.
• Championed use of AWS Serverless to deliver full-stack solutions quickly and bypass Ops bottlenecks. Our Cloudformation powered infrastructure hosts Storybook, our production CDN and several microfrontend applications.

The Trade Desk | Senior Software Engineer

Feb 2020 – Aug 2020

Senior front-end developer on the Core Experiences team, which is responsible for the Trade Desk's primary customer facing campaign management interface. Worked with small team to release a new dashboard home page experience over 3 months.

• Helped define requirements with UX design team and product manager. Self-organized JIRA tasks with other developers to distribute workload.
• Implemented React data visualization component for dashboard. To meet dev team technical goals of avoiding dependency bloat within application, SVG logic was written from scratch. Also designed component for general use to meet UX goal of leveraging visualization elsewhere in application. A month later, separate project managed to reuse component with no upstream changes needed.
• Independently architected and implemented a profile image upload feature from design concept to release. Used web canvas to crop, resize and compress image. Leveraged years of S3 experience towards creating a pre-signed url flow that secured upload against abuse (enforced mime types, size, and path)

Left company after 7 months during move abroad.

Amazon | Front-End Engineer

July 2016 – Jan 2019

Front-End Engineer on a product team developing Amazon's new customer service chat platform, MessageUs.

• Joined the project during its prototype phase in July 2016, and helped roll out a MVP to prove the viability of customer service automation in time for the holiday season. In order to meet ambitious deadline, I worked with a remote team to leverage an existing deprecated chat interface, and extended its functionality.
• After initial promising results, the MVP feature set was expanded and the product was incrementally released. During this phase, I was responsible for designing and implementing front-end features, helping onboard a new front-end engineer, and for monitoring releases. As of July 2018, MessageUs is available to all customers in the US and India, and has handled over 14 million customer service contacts.
• After initial launch, I proposed splitting the existing chat codebase to better streamline development by separating responsibilities between remote and Seattle-based team. Successfully architected a webpack-based CI pipeline to build from multiple repos, and removed collaboration bottleneck. Increased our code throughput by 3x, and reduced average code review turnaround time from 1.5 weeks to 3 days.
• By separating the frontend codebase, our team successfully migrated from jQuery to an application built on React.js, Redux and Redux Saga.
• I developed a test suite tooling based on Jest and Enzyme, and led the effort to ensure that our migration followed a test-driven policy. The result is that we migrated from a codebase that was entirely manually tested, to one that had 87% test coverage (both from unit and functional tests)
• In 2017, the UX team approached the product team with a request to conduct a high-fidelity user study. The estimated effort was about a month's work spread across several different functional teams. However, I proposed using the soon-to-be-released react.js codebase instead. I wrote a simple AWS S3 deployment script and created an internal app for the UX team in less than a week.
• Independently identified a gap in our knowledge of user activity, and pursued architecting and developing an ElasticSearch based user-analytics platform for UI generated metrics. Once system was fully rolled-out, the platform ingested over 10gb of user analytics a day, and provided our team valuable insights into previously hidden user behavior.
• The ElasticSearch based analytics platform ingested data via a Kinesis and a Lambda transformation function. The deployment script was based on the Serverless framework, and made heavy use of Cloudformation, so that the entire stack could be easily created in a single deploy.
• In addition to team responsibilities, I also became an official Security Certifier for other projects within the Amazon. This role entailed reviewing/testing project architectures for data handling compliance, and access control. As many teams within Amazon are currently migrating to AWS, I was often tasked with helping consult on AWS security best practices.

Avalara | Front-End Developer

July 2013 – June 2016

Avalara helps thousands of companies manage sales tax compliance. I was part of a small UX team building the next generation portal for Avalara's suite of products.

• Top Github contributor over most of the 2 year project history. Helped drive our team's development pace to meet aggressive milestones and successfully deliver our product.
• Developed some of our app's key UI features: Bulk data import tools that allowed customers to direct upload data from spreadsheets, and integration with ElasticSearch to provide typeahead search.
• Took initiative to architect our front end integration testing, which allowed our team to switch to a behavior test driven methodology, adopt a CI to verify pull requests, and greatly reduce regression bugs.
• Maintained an automated full-stack smoke test suite using Selenium, helping QA team verify that live environments were free of configuration or integration issues.
• Was driving proponent to use SASS as CSS tooling; refactored our stylesheets towards a reusable cross-application theme, ultimately used by several live customer-facing apps.
• Helped write scripting to deploy Express.js on AWS infrastructure, using EC2, ElastiCache. Designed solution to help reduce deploy times from 15+ minutes to < 2 minutes using S3 and Cloudfront.
• Recommended and integrated JavaScript logging tool, which was successfully used to identify and resolve live customer-affecting bugs.

Makapen Inc | Co-founder

Jan 2014 – July 2016

Makapen was a web agency that helped entrepreneurs with prototypes and MVPs.

• Architected 15+ MVPs and prototypes for e-commerce, productivity, and social startups.
• Directed the company's technology toolset and strategy to deliver solutions to clients significantly faster and cheaper than traditional agencies by leveraging SaaS products, including Firebase, Auth0, AWS, Google Cloud, Heroku, Braintree, Mandrill.
• Mentored junior developers on a weekly basis to master Ember.js and AWS technologies. This helped scale our business to double revenue in our second year.

Conductiv | Contract Lead Web Developer

Oct 2012 – May 2013

Conductiv is a startup providing mobile POS solutions for small businesses and salespeople. Led an offshore team to deliver POS prototype that helped win a six-figure sale from Vans shoes.

• Architected the AngularJS hybrid web app that allowed our web developers to author web templates for a digital product catalog, and publish the app on the iOS and Android app stores.
• Leveraged IndexedDB and the FileSystem API to support offline needs of traveling sales force.

The Foundry Agency | Contract Web Developer

Aug 2011 – Sep 2012

Part of a 3-person team that enabled this small web agency to deliver on a large technology contract with Chick-fil-a.

• Used Backbone.js to deliver single page calendaring tool for restaurant franchise operators.
• Consulted Chick-fil-a IT department towards their pilot adoption of AWS (EC2, RDS, ElastiCache).

Responsible for maintaining web content and developing new web solutions for the Foundry Agency’s clients.

• Transformed Photoshop design concepts into web content.
• Maintained a custom tailored CMS solution to manage fleet of brands' sites.