About the company + my role..
Previously known as Bedrocket, Sportsrocket is a media company based in NYC and Bellevue, WA. Clients include AS Roma, Network A and Scout.
I worked as a software engineer, dealing mostly with JavaScript (vanilla and AngularJS) and CSS.
Technologies I used were..
- HTML
- CSS
- SCSS
- AngularJS
- Plain ol' JS
- Karma
- Jasmine>
- Git
- GitHub
- Grunt
- Gulp
- AWS
- Zepelin
Jumping into the CMS
I began my time at Sportsrocket on the content management system team, for a product called Boxxspring that used HTML, AngularJS, SCSS and Ruby on Rails. I helped maintain existing features and SDKs related to the CMS, and added new features as requested. I also helped write tests for the CMS product with Karma and Jasmine.
Well, looks like we need a video player..
After a few weeks I began work on a proprietary video player to replace the 3rd-party video player being used, and joined the new video player team with three others. To ensure no external issues when clients used the video player, I helped build an internal JavaScript framework similar to AngularJS called Unimatrix.js. The video player and Unimatrix were both pure JavaScript, and were tested thoroughly across many, many devices. Fun fact: a video player developer and I covertly tested our video player in the Bellevue Microsoft store on the new Surface and several Windows phones while our company was waiting for the new Surface to get to us.
Along with writing JavaScript used in Unimatrix and our video player, I also helped code out the interface of the video player, and coded out the interactions for the video player’s volume and video quality controls.
Technical stuff
We used AWS for storage and deployment of our video player and CMS, and had a rigorous QA process before anything could be merged to our master branch (we used Git and GitHub with Gitflow) and deployed to production.
Getting the band together
Once the video player was ready to be released, I built the integration with our Boxxspring CMS so that all videos uploaded to Boxxspring would use our video player. To do this, I built several AngularJS directives for our video player, other video players allowed in the CMS (DailyMotion, YouTube, Vimeo), and a service that handled the integration for our video player specifically. This code had to be as DRY as possible given the variety of directives - the code also needed to be readable to ensure others on the team could easily understand what each service/directive was being used for, and how to make modifications to it. Prior to leaving the company, I wrote documentation to ensure the code related to this integration would be understood and handled as well as possible!
I also coded out a tool that allows users to clip their video content, which was fun to do!