DWG NO. POC-02 · TITLE: BLUEPRINT → BUILD · SHEET 1 OF 5
Principal software engineer · AI-native developer workflows · customer-facing engineering
Ten-plus years shipping production software — and I was a mechanical engineer before any of it, so I still work the same way: draw it first, then build it. This page does both — every section starts as linework and assembles as you scroll.
Scroll to assemble
SHEET 2 OF 5 · ASSEMBLY SEQUENCE
Eight steps, in order. Each one taught me something the next one needed.
Step 01 · Norfolk Southern · 2013
I supervised production lines at the locomotive works in Altoona, PA — and got tired of paper travelers. So I taught myself to program on the shop floor: a multi-tier data system tracking work across the production line, and Python automation pulling QC measurements straight off the CNC machines — eliminating eight hours a week of manual data entry.
Self-taught, on the clock · −8 hrs/wk manual entry · Jan 2013 – Jul 2015
Step 02 · NAVSEA SWRMC, U.S. Navy · 2015
Engineering Technician V at the Southwest Regional Maintenance Center — where the software kept outrunning the day job. I built a MERN-stack data collection system that cut data processing time and automated stakeholder reporting, and it earned a U.S. Navy Innovation Award.
U.S. Navy Innovation Award · MERN stack · Aug 2015 – May 2018
Step 03 · Founder · c. 2016
Nights and weekends of the San Diego years: I founded a digital menu-board startup — real-time boards a bar owner updates from any web-connected device. Installed in five venues. Sales, installs, and every line of code — mine.
Field-installed: 5 venues · San Diego + Philadelphia
Step 04 · Accenture · 2018
Big codebases, bigger stakeholder maps. Working with Life Science Cloud clients, I ran discovery on their document-upload pain, then shipped the fixes and automation myself — cutting client-reported issues 84% and saving roughly $45k a year. Sitting with the customer first became the habit.
−84% client-reported issues · ~$45k/yr saved · May 2018 – Apr 2019
Step 05 · Comcast X1 telemetry · 2019
Leading three developers, I re-architected the real-time telemetry front end around NgRx — resolving 87% of the tech debt and tripling feature delivery. I built the JavaScript data-collection library that scaled to 30 million devices, D3.js visualizations including a live per-market map of the U.S., and Python blue/green monitoring to catch data drift. Instrumenting heavy machinery, if you squint — just with better tooling.
30M devices · 87% tech debt resolved · +200% feature delivery · Apr 2019 – May 2021
Step 06 · Fort Robotics · 2021
I led a team of five building Fort's first client-facing product: an Angular web and Ionic mobile portal for managing their robotic safety-controller platform — the release that let a hardware company pivot to platform-first software. I machined the core component library myself: infinite-scroll and lazy-load directives, form wizards, async validators.
Angular · Ionic · strict TypeScript · RxJS · team of 5 · 2021–2022
Step 07 · Comcast · Xumo TV · 2022
Technical lead on the resident smart-TV application — the layer where client-facing UI, third-party apps, physical TV hardware, and external APIs all meet on one screen. I built TV Toolkit, a one-click debugging and device-interface suite for developers and QA that cut onboarding and dev cycles 10%. My AI Academy capstone shipped an XGBoost model into a customer-facing troubleshooting chat app, raising next-action acceptance 30% — and I was promoted to Principal Engineer along the way.
TV Toolkit: −10% dev cycles · XGBoost: +30% acceptance · May 2022 – 2025
Step 08 · Comcast · X1 · AS BUILT
The current revision. I lead a squad embedded across the X1 org: we run discovery to find where developers actually lose time, then ship AI workflows that get adopted company-wide. An agentic vulnerability-fix pipeline with human-in-the-loop PRs has cut open security vulnerabilities 80%. A spec-driven, AI-assisted migration is moving a mission-critical app from Java 8 to Java 25 — literally working from the drawings. An AI system repairs broken tests, finds E2E coverage gaps, and generates new tests; an org-wide LLM onboarding tool puts the same leverage in non-technical hands.
−80% open security vulns · adopted company-wide · May 2025 – present
SHEET 3 OF 5 · SYSTEM DIAGRAM · AS-BUILT
SYSTEM DIAGRAM I recently migrated this site off Firebase hosting onto a box I run myself. Keep scrolling — the stack draws itself.
SHEET 4 OF 5 · RELEASED DRAWINGS
Real products, in service — the newest ones drawn around AI. Title blocks list the material each one is machined from.
A production platform I built solo: design your characters, generate AI-illustrated stories around them, and order the result as a hardcover book — software that ends as a physical part, the finished piece off this drawing. I own every layer: prompt iteration, cost and latency tradeoffs, blue/green rollouts, end-to-end testing, and production observability.
myinkwellbooks.com ↗Multi-tenant household finance — everyone budgets from the same set of numbers, with AI coaching and performance charting on top. Cloud functions, push notifications, and automated publishing through GitHub Actions. Live on the App Store and Google Play.
Cross-platform goal tracking with an AI coach built in: Gemini-powered check-ins and plan generation from your health data, goals, and performance. One Flutter codebase — iOS, Android, desktop, and web.
github.com/rjw1428/taskr ↗A locally hosted MCP server that hands my AI agents custom tooling — fixtures machined to spec, like a resilient weather cache. Small parts, tight tolerances.
github.com/rjw1428/weather-api ↗Forward-deployed with Accenture's first entrepreneur-in-residence — a healthcare AI startup. I architected the core product: the pipeline ingesting wearable healthcare data into their AI engine, the ETL behind it, and the B2B and B2C portals in front of it.
rehuman.co.uk ↗JIRA for contractors: bidding and estimation tracking with dashboards, reports, charting, exports, and file attachments — the paper traveler problem again, solved for the building trades this time.
live demo ↗| Part no. | Drawing | Material | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| SSR-001 | SSR Digital Displays — real-time menu boards, five venues | Angular · Firebase realtime sync | Superseded |
| ALP-008 | Alpine Knives — e-commerce for a custom knife maker, Stripe checkout to transactional email | Angular · Firebase · Stripe · SendGrid | In service |
| BRD-002 | Brody's Burgers — restaurant site the owner edits from his phone | Angular · Firebase content sync | In service |
| RW-1428 | This site's infrastructure — Sheet 3 is the as-built drawing | Node/Express · Docker Compose · nginx · Let's Encrypt | As built |
| BUR-005 | The Burwell Project — collaborative workspace rental management, scheduling to billing to reservations on one drawing | Angular · Firebase · Stripe | In service |