Sloan Finger

DevDogs is unique on UGA campus. There is a plethora of programming clubs on campus that give students experience working on solo, short-term projects. Instead, we work as a team on one large project over a year. We plan our projects to give students experience using industry-standard technologies and working in a professional development environment.

With all of our projects, we want to give back to the broader Athens or UGA community. This, year our project is a community resource forum, a web application whose purpose is to provide a unified platform for students to exchange academic resources, become involved in extra-cirricular events on-campus, and access support in building their career. In line with our mission and values, all of the code is open-source.

As the club’s technical chair, I work with the executive board to design and plan the project. I implemented and maintain our DevOps pipeline for the project, which included setting up the local development enviornment for the team. This included emulating our backend configuration (MySQL and Amazon S3) in Docker for streamlined local development.

Since our code is open-source on GitHub, we use their features to automate code quality and formatting checks. We also use their pull request and branch protection system to mandate manual code reviews by more experienced developers, providing contributors with quick yet valuable feedback and ensuring code which reaches production is up-to-standard.

I also administrate the web hosting, MySQL database, and Amazon S3 services used in the live deployment of the project. Since we have several teams all working on different features in parallel, I also maintain a system of automated preview deployments, allowing teams to see their contributions early.

Cook’s Radon provides radon testing and mitigation services to residential and commercial customers. Despite their excellent customer satisfaction, they were looking to grow their oneline presence.

I redesigned their website, using more modern technologies and optimizing for search engine visibility. In addition, I added new features: customers can now request (free) estimates and schedule appointments online. I also administrate their company Google Workspace account, giving company representatives a professional email to use in communication with sales leads or returning customers. All of this, most importantly, was designed to integrate with their existing procedures and workflows, making the transition from their previous provider as seamless as possible.

I also manage their digital marketing: we maintain multiple different add campaigns, driving both website visits and calls to radon experts on staff in their office.

Pig-N-Chik is a fast-casual Barbeque restaurant with multiple locations in the metro-Atlanta area. When I was hired, the restaurant was transitioning to use a new, digital POS system. I redesigned their website to integrate with their new digital menu, allowing for changes made to the menu in the POS to be immediately reflected on the website.

Pig-N-Chik saw a 2.5× boost in traffic over the first year, plus a 5× increase in traffic over three years.

Later, I integrated the website with Pig-N-Chik’ rewards program and collaborated with the restaurant’s marketing firm to implement the required back-end functionality for digital and in-store promotions.

Like Cook’s Radon, I administrate the company Google Workspace account,giving company representatives a professional email to use in communication with investors, vendors, and catering clients.