When I left NAVAIR to work for Rackspace, it was primarily to move closer to family. What I didn't realize at the time was my family was growing... I was joining the Rackspace family!
Rackspace has these amazing core values that make work fantastic. At Rackspace, employees are known as Rackers, and treating Rackers like friends and family is one my favorite core values. My teammates and the other Rackers I have worked with really do live this value well, and it makes going to work very enjoyable.
At Rackspace, my job has been and is currently, Lead Software Developer for Self-Service. Self-Service is a small team dedicated to providing customers with the information they need to tackle problems on their own. By helping to answer customer’s questions online, before they call or chat with a support Racker, our team reduces support costs. Also, by empowering customers to do more on their own, they use more of our products, which brings in revenue.
When I started, I was quickly introduced to a wide range of platforms we supported, and learned an even wider range of technologies to support them all. Our support hub used MoonScript, Lua, Lapis and PostgreSQL. Our Knowledge Center used Drupal, PHP and MySQL. Our Launch Guides used Slim, PHP and MongoDB. Our API Docs used Java Servlets with JSP, Maven, Nexus, DocBook and WADL. Our analytics platform used Adobe Marketing Cloud and Tealium. Our Community forum used Telligent, .NET and Velocity script. We also supported several internal tools. A mapping tool used Ruby on Rails, and an internal documentation tool used Chicago Boss and Erlang. Being web-applications, they all naturally used HTML, CSS and JavaScript and jQuery.
As you can imagine, that’s a lot for anyone to manage, and I didn’t become an expert in every one of these platforms, but I did some work in all. One of my goals was to unify and simplify our systems, reducing the number of technologies used, so our team could work more efficiently.
Over the past two years, I have been successful at shedding the crazier technologies and reducing the number of platforms we support. We passed the internal tools to another team, since that was outside our team’s mission. We also migrated almost all the other web properties to a single documentation platform, known as deconst, which was developed largely by another team at Rackspace. By working with this other team, it freed up my team to focus on the aspects most relevant to our website, content and writers.
You can see the result of this work online. API docs was the first site we began migrating. You can see most of the books are now in Developer Docs.. The last few books will be migrated soon. Support hub was next, and lastly, the How-To Site replaced our Knowledge Center.
The new platform uses quite a few technologies as well, including Node.js, Python, Ruby, Sphinx, Jekyll, Docker, Ansible, Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana, MongoDB and Cloud Files. While that may at first seem like a long list, the use of each technology and the microservices architecture really make this setup much easier to work with.
While reducing all the complexity is certainly a win, another one of my goals was to significantly improve the experience for our customers. I did just that by leading the development of what we call the Support Drawer.
The Support Drawer puts all the cloud customer’s methods of support in one easy-to-use place. When customers click the Support link from within the cloud control panel, a drawer slides out from the side of the page giving them options to select a from a context-sensitive list of articles, search all self-service content, check system status, start a chat, visit the online community, create a ticket, or call a Racker. A previous version of the Support Drawer allowed customers to post their question directly in the community forum, and we had SAML integration with the Community to perform authentication. Another previous version of the drawer allowed users to click a button and have a Racker quickly call them. We also helped customers to upgrade their Support Service Level by adding a banner ad of sorts within the drawer to learn more about support service levels.
Customers and support Rackers alike have greatly benefited from this new capability within the cloud control panel. Not only that, but the industry took notice of it. On February 27, 2015, my team was awarded the Gold Stevie Award in the IVR or Web Service Solution category.
In addition to my role as Lead Software Developer, I am also known for my leadership role in the summer intern program at Rackspace. I am responsible for the interns in the Cloud business unit. This past summer, there were 11 interns in Cloud, and next summer we plan to hire 15. This requires coordination with senior leadership, other business units, human resources, hiring managers, and students.
During the summer, I coordinate activities, teach and mentor the interns. During the rest of the year, I help recruiting by speaking at events like Texas A&M’s Engineering Industry Seminar, or by talking to students at career fairs. Of course there is a lot of planning and interviews too.
In addition to helping interns, I enjoy teaching and mentoring other students and professionals. I have helped mentor at several hackathons. In August, I led a workshop at the SoHacks Hackathon on building a website with GitHub Pages and I won an award for being one of the top mentors.
Within Rackspace, I have led several Coding Dojos using both Python and Golang. Beyond Rackspace, I have spoken several times at the Alamo Python Learners Meetup, now Alamo Code Learners. My talk in July 2015 was on Python Setuptools and Web Scraping.
Lastly, I do quite a bit of non-coding outreach through Castle Chess. Rackspace really supports community outreach. One way they do that is by providing 24 hours of volunteer time, which I have completely used for the past two years, teaching an after-school chess program at Encino Park Elementary School. I also teach chess two other times each week at Encino Branch Library and Parman Library. This outreach is strictly volunteer, and I enjoy seeing the kids learn important life skills from this fun and mentally-stimulating game.
What we all want is to be valued members of a winning team on an inspiring mission.Graham Weston, Co-Founder and Chairman of Rackspace