Shay Pletcher

Outcomes4Me helps patients navigate the overwhelming world of cancer care without dumping documents at their feet, and helps empower them to discover new options and make their own choices in their care.

I was the point person for everything to do with cloud infrastructure and a lot of things to do with backend development and maintenance. I helped the team migrate to a distributed and container-based architecture, implemented industry standards in CI/CD, and led several efforts to refactor the tech-debt-laden code that's inevitable in any early stage startup, as well as setting up processes to keep us moving forward on all of these without me having to nag anybody.

The Broad is the home of (by far) the world's largest store of genome sequencing data. I helped people move it around and get it processed, to the tune of terabytes a day.

I was the technical lead for the frontline operations (Hops (silent H)) team, which is in charge of delivering data between their applications, processing it for valuable metrics, and troubleshooting when things go wrong. My chief duties were writing automations and web infrastructure to get this done and managing the various services they were writing to do that. Alongside that, I was 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.