Purpose
I often find myself at the bottom of the rabbit hole (or at least as far down as I can crawl). I have many interests. I want to post my write-ups here for those that are interested. Perhaps I can save another innocent bystander from hearing me talk ad nauseam the complexities of relational database locking, adventure motorcycling or heaven forbid, music theroy…
Posts may include:
- Heinous programming problems
- Optimal violin setup for old-time fiddeling
- Adventure motorcycling
- The state of software development
- Climbing & yoga
- The suffering that is javascript
Who am I?
My name is Zachary Allen Bishop. I was born in Indianapolis, Indiana in the late 90’s and I have spent most of my life here.
Those who know me, know that I have deep interests. It is hard for me to leave something at the surface. I often become consumed by my interests. Music, computing and adventuring have consumed me the most.
Work
I am currently a Software Engineer II at Best Choice Products. I have been here 7 years. I run a team of four people that are building an internal platforms for the company. I have developed many different softwares that work on different parts of the business. It has been an awesome rollercoaster. Here are some highlights.
A Programming Forklift Driver
I started as a forklift driver while I was in college. After my first year of school, I found myself trying to apply some programming at work (in the warehouse). I ended up writing a python script that could automatically login to the inventory system (using selenium…) and download data. I used this data to automatically generate a report for my boss. I did this purley as a programming excercise but after I gave it too my boss, they were thrilled and told me that I should not be driving a forklift with my skills…
ZachJump (little WMS)
After a few months, I was moved into the warehouse office as an administrator. There, I learned about the world’s most popular functional programming language… excel…. Back in those days, the company had one software to keep track of warehouse inventory, and the rest was driven by excel. It was astounding how much of the process relied on manual excel processes and terrifying VBA scripts. After learning the process, I started writing a few python scripts to make life easier.
After some time, the IT director caught wind that some warehouse worker was writing scripts. He was not happy. After a meeting however, he saw the potential and assigned me with my first real programming project. My first project was automating a most of the manual excel processes for the warehouse. This entailed porting a terrible VBA script to python and implementing additional logic. This project grew for over two years until it became a sudo WMS that was running the entire warehouses operation (excluding inventory). This project became known as ZachJump as a play on words of a popular warehouse software called HighJump. It is not wise to brand a software project using your own name. Things are fine until the software is breaking and everybody in the warehouse knows who’s fault it is…
Catapult (big WMS)
After the success of python automations my boss figured we could develope an entire WMS that could run all four of our warehouses. Because of my experience of working in warehouses and writing code, I was chosen to design a large part of this software. Utalizing an off-shore team, we developed the first version over a year and deployed it to a warehouse. After another year of growing pains, we took over all warehouses and operations.
This was the single greatest learning experience of my career. I still work on this project today and over the past 5 years I have watched it evolve from chaos into something that is reliably shipping 3M packages every year. I have many trials and tribulations from this project. Catapult is a online, highly concurrent, mission critical, transactional system. That is a can of worms…
After the WMS project matured, I was promoted and given a team and a new project. This new project is aimed at automating the brain of the company.
Pulse
Pulse is my current project. Pulse is the heartbeat of the company. As the business grows, it become too complicated for humans to manage. Online retail is a highly competitive space. In order for our business to stay competitive, we must quickly react to changes in the market. Pulse is a high-order data collection and aggregation tool that is that dashboard for products. Pulse aims to be a one-stop-shop for all things sales and product business decision. With pulse, our sales team can view the realtime performance of a product in the market. Pulse uses a product plan to automatically perform actions (such as running sales or ordering more inventory). Pulse will notify us of potential dangers such as product market shifts, inventory shortages, or even competitor degredations.