Software Engineer
In 2021 I participated in a public hackathon sponsored by Ford. Being retired, I found hackathons are a great way to continue to meet people and continue to learn new technologies. During the hackathon I regularly helped other contestants debug issues with their projects, offering support in chat and Teams meetings. Two of my three entries won prizes but my third entry (a vehicle simulator) was more targeted at developers than end-users, so it didn't win. I had a few opportunities to meet with various leaders at Ford and I really enjoyed the experience. Having only been retired a year, I wasn't interested in a job, however with a sub-contractor position (via RealogicWorks) I could work once or twice a week, creating a commercial version of my vehicle simulator -- it was too good to pass up!The primary project I worked on at Ford was a vehicle simulator for the FordConnect API. It exposes a JSON endpoint that is identical to the FordConnect API, but it also exposes a simulator API that enables developers to manipulate the vehicle. Application developers target the FordConnect API, and with the simulator they can easily verify their application will work with specific scenarios - such as low fuel, doors in a certain state & geo-location information.The hackathon simulator used JavaScript, NodeJS and ngrok.io. The simulator I built at Ford uses Java EcoBoost (SpringBoot), Lombok, MySql - then MongoDB - and now migrating to PostgreSQL. I've tried to follow a TDD approach - the code has 100% line and branch coverage. Running against 42Crunch, it has a score of 100/100% (although a couple of 'information' issues could be improved on). Deployment into the cloud is currently via PCF.The second project I worked on was creating linter rules for validating intentional design for REST APIs. I created rules for stoplight.io Spectral tool, reducing the amount of manual validation required.It's been great, but I decided to go back to retirement life for now. ;)
