Daniel McFarlane

Background

About Daniel McFarlane

I am a young professional starting out my career in the software engineering industry. My current role, a CORE Technology Associate, allows me to explore different sectors of Comcast NBCUniversal, an industry giant at the intersection of innovative tech and inspiring forms of media. Within the first two years of my career, I am gaining useful insights into the tech industry, experiences that are preparing me to eventually blossom into a highly effective and business-oriented leader. The CORE Technology Program has immersed me within Universal Studios, Xfinity Mobile, and Xfinity X1 teams over the last 2 years. At Universal Studios, I supported the Global Solution Architecture team by centralizing enterprise knowledge, creating sequence diagrams, and documenting solution details. I also supported the microservices platform team as a developer, where I containerized four codebases featuring mission-critical tasks: credit card validation, location tracking within the park, park reservation management, and ongoing web promotions. Through this yearlong experience, I gained an understanding of enterprise structure within the parks segment of Comcast as well as experience doing middleware development with NodeJS. Following this experience, I moved to Comcast HQ and joined the customer onboarding team under Xfinity Mobile. Here, I learned mobile development, specifically Android development using Kotlin. My work enhanced the gateway activation flows on the flagship Xfinity app, which facilitates the experience customers have when setting up any given Comcast device. I also operated in the Kibana Elastic platform to create data monitors and analyze logs, which were used to identify weaknesses in Xfinity’s activation flows and form improvements to the logic. My current team is within Comcast's cable box space: Xfinity X1. This team focuses on delivering sports apps to engage X1 users in ongoing live events. To deliver these TV apps, I have had to partner with cross-functional teams across Comcast, Sky, and MIT, and our work has resulted in increased user engagement during significant live events including NASA's IM2 mission and the Epic Universe theme park opening. The tech stack involves a LightningJS framework, backed by AWS S3 and DynamoDB to ensure robust data resilience and optimal performance.