Day Zero - From Private Island to Public Portfolio

For the past few years, I’ve been a part of Seventy3, LLC, a subsidiary of RE/MAX, LLC. Our team served as the engine room for the company’s listing aggregation and geolocation intelligence services. It was high-stakes work involving complex data pipelines and legacy system modernization.

Recently, our department was acquired by Constellation Data Labs, Inc. As the dust settled on the acquisition, RE/MAX shifted its internal technology strategy, and my role was made redundant. While layoffs are never easy, I’m viewing this as a forced “inflection point”—a chance to move from the private “island” I’ve been working on and start a new chapter in my software engineering career.

The “Invisible” Stack

In my role at RE/MAX, I had the pleasure of learning a massive range of technologies hands-on. I wasn’t just writing code; I was managing the entire lifecycle of products that power a global brand. My daily toolkit included:

  • Languages: Polyglot development across Ruby, Go, TypeScript, and PHP.
  • Data Architecture: Managing diverse data needs with PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, and MongoDB.
  • Cloud & DevOps: Orchestrating environments in AWS using Terraform, Docker, and Kubernetes, and automating it all via GitLab CI/CD.

The “Blank Slate” Realization

When I sat down to kickstart my job search, I hit a snag. I went to my GitLab profile and realized that while I have years of private contributions—thousands of commits across that entire stack—my public profile is a total blank slate. To the outside world, that work is invisible. I realized that if can’t show the code I wrote for RE/MAX, I have to write new code that proves I know my stuff.

That’s why I created this blog. You’re currently reading the first entry of a “build-in-public” journey. I chose Hugo to power this site because of its incredible speed and simplicity.

Moving forward, I’ll be using this space to document my approach to building these projects, as well as retrospectives on the real-world engineering problems I solved at Seventy3.

I’m not just looking for a job; I’m building a portfolio that reflects the level of engineering I’ve been doing behind closed doors for years.

Welcome to Day Zero. Let’s get to work.