Damien Storm

The business model for WeaveUp was evolving to take advantage of unrealized market opportunities. It became clear that our platform needed upgrading to meet our business goals. We decided to re-architect the platform from the ground up into a modern, containerized application running on Kubernetes in AWS.

As head of QA and one of the most senior team members, I became heavily involved in the planning and execution of this project. Our new engineering director relied heavily on me while planning the new platform's architecture to ensure it would meet current and future business needs. I assisted with all aspects of the process; documenting the business requirements, planning for data migrations, making decisions about which technologies to use, and more. The project allowed me to grow skills in product development, DevOps, architecture planning, and other aspects of building a platform from the ground up.

During this project, I was promoted from Lead QA to Product Owner and given more responsibility and ownership over the re-architecture. This chance to move to the head of the development process was a challenging and rewarding change from my years of experience in QA. I quickly found my stride working with and coordinating a cross-functional leadership team of stakeholders, clients, engineers, and designers to build the next generation of the WeaveUp platform.

This project also necessitated growing the team at WeaveUp and updating our development processes to take advantage of this new platform. Building a tight-knit, inclusive, and high-functioning group was our top priority, and I took a lead role in fulfilling this goal.

Our hard work and careful planning enabled the successful launch of our new platform. The capabilities and promise of that new platform, along with our team's drive and commitment, led to the ultimate reward: shortly after the launch, JOANN Fabrics acquired WeaveUp to help shape the future of digital printing.

When I joined the team at WeaveUp, our CI tests were all running on Travis CI. They were slow, unreliable, and frustrating for the dev team. I set up our own Jenkins server inside our GCP cluster to take over our CI tests, run the automated regression suite, and handle other DevOps tasks.

After switching over, our CI test ran an order of magnitude faster and was much more reliable. Our own Jenkins server enabled us to automate more of our development process and add new tools to our DevOps pipelines.

We had used JIRA to manage our project tasks since I started at WeaveUp. Still, everyone on the engineering team agreed that it only caused problems and disrupted the development workflow. I researched potential solutions and helped the business and engineering teams transition to ZenHub by creating an updated project workflow where everyone could use the same tool. I also wrote a script to import all of our existing JIRA tasks into ZenHub to ensure we didn't lose any valuable data in the process.

Now all the project management happens on GitHub via ZenHub in the same place where all our development was already taking place. This improvement to our workflow has given the engineering and business teams added visibility on the entire project workflow and increased our overall productivity.