XANDER

Projects

• positron

  Instructure's main SaaS offering has been around for a long time and has a pretty slick deployment story. However, many of the other services and smaller apps are more unwieldy to easily deploy. This is an opinionated deploy manager that has an easy process for deploying from master to beta to production, and keeping track of what's deployed. This has turned my team's deploy process from parsing READMEs and running many commands into the same simple process, no matter the specifics.

  Golang Internal - Instructure

• ddb-simple-migrate

  github.com/xandroxygen/ddb-simple-migrate

  Changing table schema is a problem I've had to solve a few times over the past few years, so I finally made a small utility script that does it for me. On-demand throughput provisioning was a game-changer for this process, making it a lot easier to modify all items in a Dynamo table. We've already used it multiple times on my team's projects at Instructure, and I'm proud of how much time this has saved us.

  Typescript DynamoDB

• Choir Seating Chart Builder

  github.com/xandroxygen/choir-chart-builder

  Built for the BYU choirs, this sheet automates the work of organizing choir members by height and section, calculating section sizes and seats, and putting it all together. It generates a seating chart configured to the user's liking, the same chart in list format, and an alternate chart to mix it up.

  Google Sheets Google App Script Typescript
  

• Canvas Live Events

  Keeping customers in the loop is very important at Instructure. Canvas generates "live events" for many actions that are taken by users in the system, and sends them to interested subscribers for their own use. I kept this system from being overwhelmed by the volume of events, and re-wrote key pieces to run much faster.

  Lambda Kinesis SQS Javascript Internal - Instructure Terraform
  

• Elysium

  Instructure has excellent internal deployment tools, but these tools lack proper support for deploying AWS Lambda functions. Instead of treating Lambda functions as only infrastructure that needs provisioning, Elysium treats the function code as releases that can easily be deployed, changed, and rolled back. Elysium can be added to a project with a simple config file, and has removed a significant amount of friction from deploying the Lambdas associated with Canvas Live Events.

  Ruby AWS SDK Terraform Internal - Instructure
  

• Microsoft Whiteboard

  products.office.com/en-us/microsoft-whiteboard

  This whiteboard started as a simple canvas for drawing, but has transformed into a powerful collaboration tool that is bundled with every Microsoft Teams meetings. I contributed to easy object organization and alignment by snapping object rotation to the cardinal directions and snapping an object to other nearby objects, which made it easier to resize objects without unwanted rotation and neatly organize groups of objects.

  C# UWP Intentional Platform
  

• PandaPom

  github.com/xandroxygen/pandapom

  I enjoy using the Pomodoro technique to manage my time, but wasn't satisfied with the existing timers out there. So, I built my own. This was a hackweek project and took less than a week of work to get running, thanks to Nuxt and the beauty of static sites.

  Vue Bulma Nuxt Terraform Github Pages
  

• Inst-FS

  A fundamental change to the way Canvas and other Instructure handles files from users. I introduced a Kinesis -> Lambda batch processing stream, migrated a massive Dynamo database, and provisioned and deployed it to multiple AWS regions. This service consolidated several disparate and insecure code paths for file uploading into one, removing a huge chunk of dead code.

  Node S3 Dynamo Kinesis Lambda Internal - Instructure Terraform
  

• microparsec

  github.com/xandroxygen/microparsec

  A bare-bones text parser that looks for keywords and regular expressions and plucks them out of the text. Inspired by Todoist's Quick Add functionality, which uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to understand what you type. This is a very simple version (<100loc!), but was an interesting exercise in using regular expressions.

  JS Regex Jest
  

• Pace

  Lingotek depends on Mesos and Marathon for container management, but the Web UI had been marked as deprecated and was lacking needed features. I built this from the ground up as a wrapper around Marathon API calls. It replicates the existing Web UI and provides extended features that reduced a 5-step deployment process (editing JSON!) to 1 click.

  Node Vue Bulma Docker Marathon
  

• GPA Calculator

  github.com/xandroxygen/elm-gpa-calc

  The GPA calculator is my version of a "Hello World" for a language - easy logic, actually does something, and is just complex enough to get a sense for the language and tools. I've been curious about Elm for a while, so I did something about it and built this.

  Elm Skeleton CSS
  

• BYU Flashcards

  ctl.byu.edu/tool/byu-flashcards

  My team of 3 built this website from the database up to help serve the BYU community by giving them a Quizlet-like website that integrated with BYU's LMS. In addition to scoping and building both the API and front-end, one of my responsibilities was collaborating with designers on features that students would appreciate and use.

  Backbone Material Design Handlebars SCSS Laravel
  

• xandermoffatt.com

  github.com/xandroxygen/xandroxygen.github.io

  This site is a simple one, built in (mostly) plain HTML and Sass. Originally started in React before realizing that was too complicated. Learned some interesting lessons with my first attempt at a small React app, but development was much easier on a more simple scale.

  Jekyll Sass Github Pages