Darrel Kathan

Senior Software Engineer

Grainger•  April 1998 - Present

I work with team members in different business areas to discover which of their work goals are tedious, repetitive, error prone or impossible so we can develop time saving software solutions to help them accomplish those goals. Accomplishments: - Built a web-based digital asset management system that is used by the Grainger organization as well as Grainger’s subsidiaries. This system enabled product information management professionals to store and manage product related digital files. - Started a monthly event that allows engineers to show off their projects that they are proud of. - Lead my team in getting all of our team’s code into GitHub. When the organization decided to switch from GitHub to Bitbucket, I also lead my team in automating the migration of our projects into Bitbucket. - Assigned to an engineering dream team that was assembled to modernize Grainger’s application platform. We designed and built several applications in our AWS cloud infrastructure. - Built a web-based file workflow system that is used by the Grainger organization as well as Grainger’s subsidiaries. This system enabled print design professionals to build automated workflows for the purpose of executing any kind of batch operations on files. Some example use cases are pre-flighting digital files, creating PDFs and FTPing those PDFs to printing companies. - Built a web-based asset publishing system to enable product information professionals to deliver digital files to remote consumers such as website content delivery networks, subsidiaries and resellers. - Built a desktop application that enabled catalog copywriters to easily reorganize their copy from a "flat" arrangement into a hierarchical arrangement. - Built a print catalog automation application which allowed users to create a new print catalog by repurposing content from existing catalogs. - Built a Grainger product specific SQL reporting and ETL framework on top of our vendor-based product information system.