Pluralsight
Throughout my tenure at Pluralsight, I’ve focused on three major areas:
Content Libraries
After Pluralsight acquired and developed several new experience which offered learners different types of content to consume beyond video courses, the team where I served as tech lead was tasked with developing a new system in conjunction with our Authorization and Product Catalog teams to migrate our legacy infrastructure from only being able to handle one content type (video courses) to multiple content types (labs, projects, guides, etc).
This new system enables more customized pricing and packaging of content and compressed the overhead for creating or updating custom slices of content for specific customers from one week to a few minutes.
This effort was particularly challenging due to the distributed nature of systems at Pluralsight but also due to the different needs of stakeholders who curate and maintain libraries of content at Pluralsight. We spent several weeksk with engineers, our product manager, and product designer carefully documenting the legacy system we were bound to replace, interviewing all current and potential future stakeholders.
We rolled out our new system, imported legacy data from the old system within a few months, then worked across teams to support the rollout of a new Authorization version based on our new system. Within 8 months, we had successfully helped multiple teams including our own migrate to the new infrastructure.
Innersource
UCDM
Projects
As a senior software engineer on Pluralsight’s Projects team where we developed interactive ways for people to achieve proficiency with new technologies they recently discovered either through video or interactive courses.
We initially created Projects inside of Code School back in 2016 to fill a need expressed by our students. Despite gaining a lot of theoretical and practical knowledge of a new technology while going through a Code School interactive course like Rails for Zombies, many of our students didn’t know where to start in order to apply their newly acquired skills.
Projects solves this blank page problem by offering students a tightly scoped Project to work on, starting with a failing test suite which serves as a list of tasks to slowly work through. This allows people to become familiar with the flow and process of software development in an environment with a tight feedback loop. Since exceptions and setup issues often results in dead ends for newcomers to a technology, we try to provide the most specific feedback possible by not only executing tests written by our authors against the code written by our learners but also guiding them through the environment-specific errors that occur when their code is executed or built.
Projects was initially extracted from Code School as a Rails REST API and GraphQL backend and a React UI front-end. We integrate with the rest of the Pluralsight ecosystem with RabbitMQ, REST APIs, and Kafka.