My name is Riley Davies. I'm a former research chemist, now spending my days as a financial systems engineer (fancy title for making spreadsheets work properly). I write software using a tool called OneStream. I clear plenty of tickets and run my fair share of product demos, but my strongest areas of expertise are developer tools and intuitive design. Here's a brief explanation of what those are:
A developer tool is a custom piece of software that makes application development easier and faster. We consultants make tools for clients, so it's sort of like being a consultant for consultants. For example, let's say your team creates a lot of stuff from scratch in a Dynamic and Fast-Paced Environment™. Your developers are going to have communication lapses. The code base will devolve into a bowl of spaghetti. Someone's probably going to reinvent the wheel at some point, but it'll be worse. Then someone else will be tasked with fixing Wheel_v2 for the next month. In all the madness, a senior developer takes a job offer somewhere else. His stuff always worked, so he was left to do his own thing, but now the new guy needs to be trained up on development that no one really understands. This hurts everybody involved. It doesn't have to be this way. I do things like:
Ta-da! Hours of developer time saved, every week, for the rest of the project. To say nothing of the endless headaches avoided: we all immediately understand each other's work, which makes troubleshooting much easier! This is a great chart to decide if automation is worth the investment, and consider that when you share your tools across a whole practice, you slap a multiplier on those time savings!
Intuitive design is part of a field known as user interface and user experience (UI/UX). Let's use this webpage as an example. User interface is what you see. It's my big green name at the top of this page, the links to my resume and research, and these formatted blocks of text where I talk about myself. User experience is what you feel. Try loading this page again and notice how fast it is. Do it again. Again! Faster! Isn't it...refreshing? Let out a sigh of relief as you realize there's no pop-up offering you 15% off my e-book if you join my mailing list. And because I'm not trying to sell your data, there's no "enable cookies" banner. This website gives you what you want, as fast as possible, and nothing more. That's UX. Where automation tools and standards take a huge burden off of developers, intuitive application design does the same sort of thing for whoever is going to end up using the software we build. This strategy reduces overhead for training sessions, tech support, and external documentation—and a sleek system is its own marketing material! How cool is that! No, I wouldn't buy a car without a detailed user manual, but more documentation doesn't fix bad design.
So now that we've established that I'm a genius for knowing that titles should have a big font size, how do I apply these unique talents? As I wrote at the top of the page, I work with a corporate performance management tool called OneStream. It's a platform for large organizations to manage money and people. And I mean really huge organizations—my list of clients includes the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Treasury, and the US Army. OneStream uses the .NET ecosystem, so I write code in Visual Basic for loading, processing, validating, and presenting client data. I use Microsoft SQL Server on the backend, and when I want to write a tool that does something really laborious really quickly, I write it in PowerShell. I've recently started studying C# to keep up with the times.
Despite being a computer nerd for hire, I also have some people skills. I interview candidates, mentor team members, assist contract proposals, write documentation, deliver trainings and tech demos, and sometimes fly out to conferences for the sublime pleasure of tripping over my words behind a podium. These softer skills are largely holdovers from my time as a chemist—try explaining solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy to a normal person without his eyes glazing over. It's as much of a science as is the research itself. You can read about my time in the lab here.
What else is there to know about me? I'm flattered that you're so interested! When I'm done being a OneStream developer for the day, I have my own projects that I like to work on. Since I got my degree in chemicals, not computers, the focus of my projects tends to jump around a lot. That way I can learn about different parts of the tech world: scripting, web development, game development, cloud infrastructure, linux config, and so on—as long as it's fun and I'm learning something. I like to get away from Microsoft in my own software, so I mainly code in Go and Bash, with some amateur history in C, JavaScript, and Python. I built this website with HTML and CSS, and I put together my resume with LaTeX.
I'm also a huge fan of the classics. I can certainly appreciate modern media, but nine times out of ten I just read old stuff. First of all, the Iliad is the greatest story of all time. I plant my flag on this hill, and I would die on it if the position weren't so defensible. I usually read Richmond Lattimore's English translation, but there's nothing like chanting dactylic hexameter in the original Greek from time to time. For the Odyssey, I prefer Robert Fitzgerald. I've taken a swing at learning Latin, but that one's on the back burner for now.
That's all I have to say here. Head back up to the top to check out my resume and research, and thank you for stopping by!
—Riley