Awedience: In response to the pandemic, I created a
virtual auditorium product that brings the company together during
remote company meetings. Employees virtually sit around live-streamed
content, expressing emoji-responses and short messages from their seats
in real-time. Watch a 2 minute demo (password:
gogetter) or read the blog post.
Internal jobs board: I contributed to a job board
employees could use to find new opportunities, integrated with existing
recruiting tools. Think careers.airbnb.com but specifically for employees.
Team pages: I contributed to the internal team browser,
featuring hierarchical navigation, and customizable team pages.
Bug reporting: I built an integration to CS tools that enables
bug reports to be quickly and easily captured alongside customer tickets.
I also maintained the web and mobile tools employees used to file bugs.
Prioritization & alerts: I built a tool for product teams to
quantify the impact of bugs, performance, accessibility, security, and availability.
Integrating Jira and CS tools, it also sends interactive notifications to
teams via Slack that dramatically decreases triage time.
Feedback widget: I created reusable customer-facing feedback intake component
that became backbone of an internal tool teams use to explore 7.5k+ entries/mo
from over 20+ installs site-wide.
Going Above & Beyond
Core Values interviewer: Interviewed hundreds of applicants including
executive level candidates and contributed to evaluation rubric that was adopted company-wide.
Engineering Meeting: I voluntarily produced this quarterly meeting for two years.
I inspired hundreds of engineers to participate & contribute, up-leveled content, developed segments,
and directed live shows, streamed worldwide.
Peek the promo (password: inspiring) or catch my own
presentation on the efficacy of my team’s process (password: hireavand).
Squawk is a Ruby gem that uses Twitter to track site activity.
Presentations
Does the Way We Work Work?
After a couple years of producing the engineering all-hands at Airbnb,
I finally decided to take the stage myself to talk about process: how
does the way we work impact the product we build?
I was helping to host a company-wide bug bash week at Airbnb. When someone
brought in actual dehydrated bugs, I got an idea. What if I challenged the
CEO, Brian Chesky, to eat a bug for every bug the engineers fixed. He took
the bait and the 5 minutes we shared on stage during an all-company meeting
may go down as the most entertaining moment I’ve ever had on stage.
Video: by request only.
Getting Closer to Your Customers
In this talk I gave at TaskRabbit, I explored ways to better understand
what your customers are thinking and feeling, and how customer support
tools can help guide better product decision making.
Before Rails had an asset pipeline, it wasn’t easy to manage CSS and JS.
In this talk I gave at Refresh Chicago and the Chicago Ruby User Group, I
discuss a Rack-based approach to packaging assets.
In this presentation to the Chicago Ruby User Group, I demonstrated an
efficient solution to form validation with AJAX that provides a more
interactive user experience, while leveraging server-side rules.
I delivered a company-wide presentation at Clarity Consulting highlighting
the benefits of proper XHTML and CSS, and demonstrating the principles of
good web design.
“It’s so easy for you to jump into different modes of thinking: technical engineering,
designing/UI, product ideation and conceptualizing, project management, selling others
on the idea. Being able to manage that end-to-end is a rare and wonderful gift.”
Cathy Miller,
Product Manager at
Airbnb
“Avand is an amazing engineer who dreams big and gets stuff done for our Airbnb
Community and with everyone around him.”
Andy Yasutake,
Director of Product Management at
Airbnb
“You’re such a creative thinker who is also able to execute big things. It’s
super admirable and you’re also just a great person to be around.”
Laura Kelly,
Engineer at
Airbnb
“I wanted to say thank you for being such an incredible ambassador for our
culture and values at Airbnb. You truly embody [the CEO’s] principles of being
an ‘owner and not a renter,’ champion the mission in all that you do, and bring
us all closer together as employees.”
William Chiu,
Recruiter at
Airbnb
“Avand is a unique combination of passionate and action oriented. He has
been a tireless promoter of quality not just because it’s the right thing
for hosts and guests and our products, but because he wants to actively
promote and enable and improve the entire engineering org. I haven't worked
with another engineer who’s taken matters into his own hands on such a big and
complex issue as [quality]. Avand is impressively product oriented in a way that
enabled the team to ship more work. Avand is an enabler and a culture changer,
and he does it not just through his passion and influence but also by cranking
out high quality work that affects the entire company and improves our culture
of quality.”
Judd Antin,
Director, Experience Research at
Airbnb
“Avand goes far above and beyond in terms of his impact across eng and the
entire company. He strives to make things better overall, and he does all
of this in addition to his day-to-day engineering role, where he is greatly
exceeding by inspiring, driving the team, and delivering results.”
Darrick Brown,
Engineering Manager at
Airbnb
“It’s rare you find an engineer who cares as much about the design as they
do the development of a product. Fortunately Avand is that engineer. He
truly cares about the product and advocates for the customer. Even if it
makes his role as an engineer more difficult, so long as it makes the
product easier to use he’s all about it. You don’t find engineers like
Avand everyday!”
Shay Howe,
Director of Product at
Belly
“I was always impressed by the passion Avand brought to his work. Avand
isn’t just a strong software engineer, he also has great product design
sense and is incredible with people. He knows how to bring out the best
in himself and his team. It’s rare to find someone who has that
cross-section of skills.”
Shawn Reigsecker,
CEO at
Centro
“I’ve hired Avand in the past and would hire him again without hesitation.
He is an excellent builder, communicator, and teammate. He has a versatile
but focused skill set that allows him to contribute effectively towards
all aspects of software development.”
Nick Kishfy,
CEO at
MojoTech
“You want Avand on your team. It’s incredibly rare to find someone with
his range of skills and passion for building great products. Full stack
engineer, product designer, amazing teammate. He’s the total package.”
Eric Berson,
Director of Sales at
Mystery Science
“The only person I can be sure cares about what they’re doing as much
as I do, if not more, is Avand. He has a relentless, almost uncompromising
desire to do the best possible work, whatever it might be. It’s incredibly
refreshing. I’ve worked with Avand several times over the years, and I’ve
never enjoyed working with anymore more—you’d be lucky to have a chance to
work with him.”
Brandon Weiss,
Engineering Manager at
Intercom
