Recall · engineering retrospective
Everything Maya Ellison demonstrably shipped in cobalt/cobalt-web, read straight from the history — not from memory.
Objective signal pulled straight from git and your connected tools.
Every bar and cell is a real commit from the log — the rhythm of the work across the whole tenure.
Real before/after numbers from your observability and quality tools — not estimates.
Backed by real merged-PR and commit counts and a real activity trace — never a self-rating.
The phases the log makes obvious — with the full commit-by-commit record underneath.
Small, safe, everywhere — hundreds of commits across every corner of the app while the mental map forms.
Commits get bigger and more surgical — Maya stops fixing symptoms and starts fixing systems.
The work turns multiplicative: platform pieces, review leverage, and the paths other engineers build on.
The flagship work as STAR stories — each with the PR, the diff, and a confidence score.
The ledger dashboard locked up rendering 5,000+ rows; support tickets called it "frozen".
Restore responsiveness without changing behavior or breaking the export path.
Introduced row virtualization, memoized the expensive cells, code-split the charts, and lazy-loaded the export module.
First paint p75 5.2s → 2.1s, 40% fewer renders, Lighthouse 61 → 94.
Offset pagination collapsed above 100k records and blocked two enterprise deals.
Ship /v2 with cursor pagination — zero breaking changes for 240 existing integrations.
Designed the cursor contract, dual-served /v1 and /v2 behind a compatibility layer, added contract tests for every documented consumer path.
p99 list latency 8.4s → 410ms on 100k-row accounts; zero breaking-change tickets filed post-launch.
Every PR waited 14+ minutes for CI; engineers batched changes to avoid the queue, making reviews bigger and riskier.
Get the feedback loop under 5 minutes without buying more runners.
Introduced remote build caching, pruned 31 phantom dependencies, split the test matrix by change surface, and added preview deploys off the cache.
Build p50 14m20s → 4m05s, 89% cache hit rate, CI spend down 62%.
Four products themed themselves with copy-pasted CSS; a brand refresh was quoted at six weeks of manual edits.
Make theming a data change, not a code change.
Extracted 212 design tokens, generated platform outputs (CSS variables, TS constants) from one source, migrated 61 components, and wired a11y contrast checks into CI.
The brand refresh shipped in 4 days; contrast violations in CI dropped to zero.
An enterprise prospect's accessibility audit returned 94 findings and a hard deadline in the contract.
Reach zero open findings before the renewal date, and stay there.
Fixed focus order and ARIA semantics across 40+ components, added keyboard paths to every interactive element, and made axe checks a merge gate.
Zero open findings at renewal; the axe gate has blocked 23 regressions since.
Every mutation refetched whole collections; the app felt like a page reload on every click.
Make interactions instant while keeping the server as the source of truth.
Introduced a normalized query cache with optimistic updates and rollback, plus a mutation queue for flaky connections.
Interaction-to-feedback under 50ms across the app; refetch traffic down 78%.