Harvard Business School: HBX: Harvard Business School

2016-03-01

Building a MOOC for the Best and Brightest

I spent two-and-a-half years working as both a front- and back-end developer on various parts of the upcoming MOOC offering from Harvard Business School. On the front-end I’m building various teaching resources in JavaScript using resources like D3 and SVG to provide on-the-fly interactive graphing and data updates.

On the back-end I’ve designed the plugin system for the teaching elements, worked on the Tastypie-based APIs for the course and administrative sides and am currently working with our Mongo collections of user metrics and user state data to build administrative reports that will allow professors to continuously improve the effectiveness of their teaching resources. In addition to hands-on coding, much of my time was spent reviewing pull requests/ working with junior engineers to turn them into senior engineers. I worked with a team of outsourced coders and developed a great rapport (and some enduring friendships) over the two plus years, gaining their trust and fostering a spirit of collaboration that was absent when I started.

As part of my responsibilities, I participated in the daily standup meetings via teleconference and worked for a time as build master, partering with the devops lead to turn a messy, by-hand deployment process into a series of reliable scripts.