Heather H.

Recently at Massless, we built cloud services on GCP. I was responsible for the tech team. I hired and managed the team consisting of frontend, backend, web3 and devops. I designed the systems architecture of the cloud services, and managed the coherence between each part of the team so that all parts of the product would work together.

The system architecture was based around microservices running on Kubernetes, both ASP.NET and Node Express containers, depending on the task being performed. It was backed up by storage in both a Postgres DB, and Firestore, with binary file storage separately in buckets. Communication back to the frontend used the Firebase realtime database. Some services used GRPC, websockets or standard http.

I liased with customers directly, assisting them in using our platform, and getting feature requirements from them. I then refined these requirements into user stories to be worked on by the team. I designed the structure and interfaces between each component so that each part could be worked on when suitable to optimize the team's efficiency. This approach ensured that no one was waiting for other people, but the product would still work smoothly once built & tested. Alongside management, I directly contributed code.

In the earlier days Massless built a pen for VR that was tracked in 6 degrees of freedom. I wrote a lot of the tracking algorithms, using OpenCV for the computer vision work. When we grew & moved the pen to 6DoF tracking, I managed a team of engineers covering embedded software (on-pen), computer vision and tracking algorithms including IMU data. I coordinated how the whole system fitted together alongside directly contributing to the software development. The software team that I managed consisted of 2 in-house engineers (including me), and 4 remote (outsourced) engineers, across 3 different timezones. We worked closely with the hardware team to ensure a great end-user experience.

During my time at Kynesim, I enjoyed many opportunities to learn through discussions with my more experienced colleges about many topics from video compression to communication protocol efficiency.

I worked on a long term project as an internet of things test engineer. My role included designing and developing tests for multiple devices and how they interacted with the iOS and Android apps. I worked alongside our clients to gather their requirements for automated, full system integration testing.

The IoT system consisted of a couple of smart home devices, a cloud API and mobile apps (iOS and Android). I implemented a test harness to control the mobile apps, implemented a serial communication protocol between python on the PC and embedded C on the device to act as the devices' test harness.

I took the test requirements, turned them into formal test scripts, and built a system that could use the test harnesses that I built to control the IoT devices and the mobile apps to test the full system.