Jon Merrifield Email & Phone Number

Sedona, Arizona, United States

Anchorage, Alaska, United States

Girdwood, Alaska, United States

San Francisco

Led a small team tasked with transitioning the platform to a modern technology stack, introducing GraphQL to replace a large RESTful API that delegates to underlying services, and React, react-router, and Apollo Client on the frontend to create the UX.I advocated for, and got wide support for, this technology transition having been almost solely responsible for maintaining the previous stack for several years. I planned a transition that would reuse as much existing platform functionality as possible (e.g. authentication), attempting to find a balance between quickly realizing the value of the new stack without incurring excessive technical debt. I delivered regular training sessions to the engineering team to introduce the new technologies and how we had them wired together, and worked directly with engineers building their first features in the new stack.I established most of our current coding standards, code style guidelines, and developer tooling for the frontend codebase, which led to significantly improved developer experience and reduced friction during code reviews.

London, United Kingdom

Implemented an automated test framework for the system in Cucumber, using Capybara for web interaction and ActiveRecord to inject setup data and make assertions against data. Created a set of emulators to mimic the external systems that get called during functional tests (e.g. payment gateways, GSM terminals).Configured TeamCity to run the tests automatically, so that whenever a commit is made to source control, the code is compiled, deployed to 8 staging environments (one for each country we support), and then the tests are run (currently around 200 scenarios, covering country-specific nuances, and the mobile UI through user-agent spoofing in selenium/webdriver).Built a custom Cucumber harness, which invokes Cucumber once for each environment, aggregates the results, re-runs any failed tests (to reduce the number of false-negatives arising due to transient issues e.g. timeouts), and then creates a custom HTML report showing the status of each environment. Also built a custom TeamCity formatter for Cucumber so that it can deal with the multiple environments, and multiple runs of failed tests.In addition to building the framework, I also support the QA engineers and developers who use it within their teams. This is both technical in nature - helping out with Ruby syntax, diagnosing tests that are failing falsely (or indeed, passing falsely) - and high level - for example holding regular workshops where interested team members come to discuss the best approach to testing a particular aspect of the system. These discussions usually center around how to express system behaviour in Gherkin in a way that is both readable, and concrete enough to build step definitions around.