SpringBot

November 23, 2024 by JoeyK

Springbot

Springbot was my second salaried position but involved more operational work than development, though I found plenty of time for developing towards the end of my time with the company. I was hired as an operations engineer to assist in on-boarding customers as well as investigating and fixing issues in multiple layers of infrastructure. The company handled various marketing needs for eCommerce customers of all sizes across several platforms including WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento, and Shopify. All of the various platforms would send data via webhooks or api calls into an ETL. (Extract/Transform/Load - An application layer to normalize data from various sources) The data would go from that ETL into a Rails application which would then perform all the marketing needs.

For the most part, my domain was everything before the Ruby app. Not being a Ruby developer did not exempt me from having to learn and understand what happened to the data in the app so that i could better solve issues though. The ETL's were written in php and Go but all of our plugins on the customer side were PHP based. Throughout my years there I understood that system incredibly well and made updates in every level of the architecture.

In this role I was very regularly interfacing directly with customers and their teams when working to resolve issues. I worked across teams in the entire company to achieve our goals and it was one of the few roles where i really felt my impact on the organization which was very rewarding. Towards the end of my time with the company I fully automated the on boarding process for new customers, a job which i was originally hired to do manually. I began partial automation after my first year but as time went on it required less and less human input to the point where a single employee could check it once a day instead of manually checking it all day every work-day.

I learned an incredible amount about how applications are