Steve Pletcher

Web/Infrastructure Engineer
Somerville, MA

About

I'm a creator and a streamliner. I'm at my best when I'm making something new and fresh that saves people either time or money, often both. My greatest creations are ones people don't have to think about at all, even if they couldn't do without them.

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Work

Software Engineer on Frontline Operations
The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard

The Broad is the home of (by far) the world's largest store of genome sequencing data. I help people move it around and get it processed, to the tune of terabytes a day.
I'm the technical lead for the frontline operations (Hops (silent H)) team, which is in charge of delivering data between our applications, processing it for valuable metrics, and troubleshooting when things go wrong. My chief duties are writing automations and web infrastructure to get this done and managing the various services we're writing to do that. Alongside that, I'm both training up the engineering skills of the rest of the team and setting things up to make their software dev learning experience as seamless and frustration-free as possible.

September 2018 - Present

Full-stack Web Developer
Pubmark, Inc.

If you don't know them, your mom does. They make BookBub, an e-book discounts newsletter, boasting over nine million subscribers to its mailing list despite employing about seventy-five people. I didn't know the market was there either.
I was part of the core product team, building new features in Ruby on Rails (among other languages and frameworks) to help people discover new books they wanted to read. Alongside those features, I deployed two independently-developed tools that boosted developer productivity and helped to release the site's partner dashboard, allowing friction-free submission and management of e-books for deals and featured slots.
After graduation, I switched to their infrastructure team, where I worked on automations and cloud architecture using AWS, Ansible, and other things that start with A. I pioneered the company's use of spot instances for batch processing and autoscaling for applications with heavily variable loads, cutting their cloud services bill by over $27,000 a month.

January 2015 - September 2018

Applications and Integrations Developer
SCVNGR, Inc.

Most people in Boston and New York know these guys for their product, LevelUp. I worked in C# to integrate LevelUp cleanly with some archaic points of sale with basically no documentation. Later on, they pulled me off that stuff and pitted me at a tougher task: I was in charge of developing internal tools to speed up work for the app development and support team's battle against a neverending sea of clients and customers.

January 2014 - August 2014

Software and Systems Developer
HaystackID

As the only developer on staff (save for our IT manager, who wasn't much for coding), I was in charge of making the little things the team had wanted but never had the resources to make. Mainly, I wrote tools to splice together tabular data and streamline formatting tasks, all of which had to work fast and work right, no exceptions. Sounds boring, but it turns out that's most of what they do. I saved them hours a day. No complaints so far.

January 2013 - June 2013

Web Development Intern
The Industrial Resolution

This was my first real job - a tiny four-developer operation that took me on when I had a year of college under my belt and not much else. Thankfully, they were patient, and they helped me figure out that web development is definitely my jam. I mostly learned web dev principles here, but I also learned that having a great boss makes everything better.

April 2012 - August 2012

Education

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, magna cum laude
Northeastern University
5 Year Program

May 2016

Skills

Asynchronous Processes

Back-end Web Development

Automations and Infrastructure

Please Don't Use This Section

To Gauge My Skills

It Just Looks Pretty

Portfolio

MBTA Console

This is a more personal project - I started this in my spare time to give me a quick way to see when to leave for work in the morning, and it kind of snowballed from there into a full-fledged console. It tracks trains, commuter rail and buses and reports the live locations of trains across Boston. The unique thing about this guy is that it's still being improved, and you can see its current state right here.

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LevelUp Order Feed

This is what happens if I get any downtime. It was a slow week on the integrations team, so I decided to use it to make this little tool - a live feed of orders made through LevelUp across the USA, written in pure Javascript and using the lovely d3.js library. It caught the CEO's eye, and it's on a TV in the company's lobby to this day.

javascript

PlainView

The legal industry's got a problem - there's too much info and nobody wants to pay people money just to figure out what's going on with their own files. Enter PlainView. An ASP.NET MVC web application designed to break down the piles of data that HaystackID took in and let users give feedback on what they want from the data, it's cut down workloads and confusion by a huge amount.

ASP.NET

Portal of Transparency

This one is a personal favorite of mine. My first web app, written entirely in PHP (to my shame), this baby pulls straight from The Industrial Resolution's issue tracking software, JIRA, to give clients a secure and honest look at exactly where we are on their project as well as how they can help us move faster. Transparency's golden.

web portal



Contact

Email
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Phone
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Please don't contact me about available positions unsolicited.
It's the best way to guarantee I don't work with you.

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