Hi there, I'm Eric Douglas Pratt.
I'm a driven software professional seeking to combine my strong background in open web technologies with a passion for the power of small teams to produce products with unrivaled end-to-end user experiences.
Here's what keeps me busy.
In my career, I have always focused on what causes people to engage more effectively, either with a product or with each other. I'm fascinated by the fact that the tiniest change in an experience can have such a huge impact on whether the user will come back for more. Discovering and making those changes is what drives me, and this is the value I bring to any organization. My work on this in the past has centered on three main themes:
Designing products with dead-simple interfaces to automate your work
- Model-driven branding that auto-generates CSS for Pegasystems Inc.
- Web-based workflow processing system designed for NYS Comptroller
- Automated homework grading system designed for RPI's Intro to Logic course
- Intranet site with automated preparation and printing of forms for my unit at NYS Comptroller
- Report generation tool that translated English to SQL designed for NYS Comptroller
- Contributions to Slate, a logic-based intelligence analysis program from the Rensselaer Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning Laboratory
Exposing tribal knowledge needed by either customers or employees
- Spearheading a project to create a centralized account of all features in our core product at Pegasystems Inc.
- Designing the internal collaboration portal, powered by SharePoint and the Pega Mesh, for all Engineering Scrum teams at Pegasystems Inc.
- Deploying MediaWiki to effectively manage communication for three team-based software and management projects at RPI
- Creating an IMDB-like productions database for promoting and managing student television productions at RPI TV
- Designing an effective web presence for the Rensselaer Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning Laboratory
Demonstrating that self-organizing teams will always outcompete hierarchical organizations
- Leading weekly Scrum Community meetings at Pegasystems Inc. to focus engineers on solving cross-team challenges
- Assuming a thought leadership and advocacy role regarding Agile development practices in the Engineering department at Pegasystems Inc.
- Serving as ScrumMaster for two Scrum teams working on UI and Case Management at Pegasystems Inc.