New York Times Replica Edition: Stepping into leadership as a developer.

In 2011, I took a part-time job with LibreDigital in Austin, TX. My role was web developer. I mainly translated Photoshop designs into working HTML/CSS landing pages, using Javascript and Perl as necessary to interface with the underlying app.

LibreDigital's product was e-editions - replica editions of magazines and newspapers around the U.S. These weren't newspaper websites - they were fully searchable, Flash-based replicas, obtainable only by subscribers. We managed hundreds of these e-editions.

My department handled the web infrastructure - eCommerce, user registration, signup, landing pages, and so on. It was based on an old Apache/Tomcat server infrastructure and our underlying registration and eCommerce software was driven by Perl and MySQL.

A few months into my tenure, my supervisor abruptly left along with other staff. Bad timing, because we were about to begin a full overhaul for our flagship client - The New York Times.

I was left as the only member of my department, so I stepped into the lead role. We promptly hired the original developer of our software and another couple of developers and I led the new team to redevelop the New York Times e-edition site.

For six months I led the team, wrote code, and managed the interaction between our team and the developers of the Flash application. There were plenty of obstacles, but in the end, we prevailed!

I tell this story to let you know that I have experience in high-pressure situations with huge clients and that I can code switch between a developer and manager mindset easily and quickly!