---
title: "Senior Development Consultant (Contract)"
author: "Jarrod Carlson"
company: "Home Depot"
industry: "Home improvement retail"
location: "Atlanta, GA"
period: "May 2016 – Sep 2016"
websites:
  - "https://www.homedepot.com/"
tech:
  - "Ruby on Rails"
  - "React"
  - "React Native"
  - "Java"
canonical: "https://builtbyjarrod.com/experience/home-depot"
---

# Senior Development Consultant (Contract) — Home Depot

May 2016 – Sep 2016 · Atlanta, GA

> Fortune 100 home improvement retail corporation; largest in the United States by revenue

**Summary:** Architected the move from legacy Java to Rails, React, and React Native on in-store handheld devices — cutting deployment cycles from 5+ days to under 2 for Home Depot's merchandising teams.

---

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.