Job Description

Ixcela measures gut microbiome signals using blood metabolite tests to make dietary and lifestyle recommendations that either help patients meet their goals or support them through illness. A former coworker had joined Ixcela and recommended me for a role as they were growing the development team. Initially, we were there to modernize their collection of scripts that communicated with their lab management software. I helped transform these scripts into an actual back-end web API, including containerizing the system in Docker. A big early project I did was to implement a framework for testing third-party integrations. At the time, we weren't using Django, but I leaned on my knowledge of it to model a simplified version that worked well for defining test APIs. After that I worked on adding Elasticsearch to our system to enable Ixcela's other teams to search and do metrics on patient and blood sample data. Next, I worked on some data transformation tools for the science team and deployed them in AWS Lambda. Around this time I took over as the sole maintainer of the back-end system we created and have been acting as such ever since. I then integrated FedEx for shipment tracking and to automate the printing of shipping labels for our blood test kits. When we transitioned to using [Practice Better](https://practicebetter.io/) as our patient-facing system, I added several integration features to our back-end system for it. We needed most of the patient record data to be imported to our internal systems for our existing workflows to work effectively. Additionally, we wanted to combine all of this data from our various systems to help us track how the business was doing, so I created dashboards to help us track important metrics. Most of the integration features I worked on across all third parties involved synchronization of data of some sort, so I had to model a lot of data relationships and manage synchronization tasks. It was a fun challenge to balance to manage all of these integrations and add the features we needed in such a way that I could continue to maintain them as a single developer.