Senior Development Consultant (Contract)

I came to Home Depot through Daugherty Business Solutions, an Atlanta consulting firm — my Rails and React background, plus years of moving fast at small agile startups, got me placed as the senior architect-consultant on an in-store mobile team of about seven: three developers, two QA engineers, and a project manager.

Merchandising in your pocket

The team was building an app for the handheld devices store associates carry, purpose-built for the merchandising crews who restock, reprice, and reset endcaps and seasonal areas overnight. An associate could scan a price tag to audit it against the system of record and, if it was wrong, enqueue a corrected batch for printing and reshelving — with store planograms a tap away.

The app was in active field testing, and that meant fieldwork: we went on-site to Atlanta-area stores to watch real merchandising teams use it and fold their feedback straight back into the product, with additional pilot markets running and a nationwide rollout in the works.

Breaking the five-day deploy

Context matters here: this was not long after Home Depot’s high-profile security breach via a third-party vendor, and everything was locked down tight. Historically a Java shop, releases meant handing WAR files from the dev team to a separate ops team — accompanied by a roughly 27-page Word document detailing what was changing and why. I know, because filling out that document was part of my job at first. Deployment cycles ran five-plus days of awful, manual labor.

Because our customers were internal, we had latitude to experiment. The key was scope: small, focused applications instead of monolithic WebSphere deployments or whole-device imaging — this was 2016, and we leaned into the microservices moment. Deployment cycles dropped to under two days.

React Native, one year in

React Native was barely a year old in 2016, and shipping it to devices inside a Fortune 20 retailer made us genuinely early adopters. It went surprisingly well — we controlled the runtime environment completely, with known hardware and limited device diversity, so we could play confidently to the platform’s strengths. The rough edges were in the native bridge — getting at platform capabilities like the camera took creative workarounds — but those were the fun kind of problem.

The engagement ended on my terms: I’d had my fill of Atlanta traffic and set my sights on Colorado. Home Depot was sorry to see me go — several of their staff offered recommendation letters on my way out.