Ben Swearingen

During the R1 project, I helped turn a rigid sales demo into a production ready system. This was a huge undertaking that included adding almost all unhappy paths, removing a tight coupling with a pure demo UI, reworking paths that relied on an experienced guide being in the car, and expanding the navigation capabilities from a tiny slice of the US to a system that supported dozens of countries.

I also took the Wake-Up-Word feature from being a frequent target of customer complaints, to something that was regularly highlighted as a great part of using the system.

During this project, I also mentored two new developers, and one developer who was new to the project.

While on the GM project for model years 20 and 21 I helped burn down a backlog of hundreds of tickets to under ten, in time for the start of production milestone.

I also ported a tool into the project that allowed us to mock results from the speech processor. This dramatically increased our ability to reproduce customer bugs, as we could force a known result instead of relying on the extremely variable speech recognizer.

During this project, I also mentored a new developer.

In the summer of 2013, I interned at Synaptics for the second time. I worked with the Digital Design Team to automate testing for a specific set of digital glitches: those where signals were changing while the clock was in a steady state rather than at the rising or falling edge.

In the summer of 2012, I interned at Synaptics for the first time. I worked with the Senior Director of Exploratory Research on a proof of concept that combined an eye-tracker and a force measuring touch pad.

Once the demo was deemed to be complete by my manager, I designed and conducted a usability survey and presented the result to C-suite management.