For those of you unfamiliar with DocuSign, it’s an industry leader in sending, signing and managing documents in the cloud. Contrary to its competitors (EchoSign, HelloSign and RightSignature), DocuSign is more enterprise oriented, the oldest (founded in 2003), and the most advanced in terms of security and number features. Personally, I would add that the word docusign itself became a term which means electronic signature, akin to the word google for web search or xerox for making a photocopy. This probably happened due to the fact that DocuSign was the first to introduce browser only e-signature and now possesses a lion’s share of the market: according to Wikipedia and Business Insider, about 90% of Fortune 500 companies had signed up with DocuSign as of July 2012.
My team works on re-imagineering the main user-facing product, i.e., the DocuSign itself. The weapons of choice are my favorites: Node.js, Backbone.js, Jade, Stylus, Grunt, Redis, Express.js, jade-browser and Mocha. In addition to that, the project is being written in CoffeeScript. A side note, I had mixed feeling about CoffeeScript before, but after I read Alex MacCaw’s The Little Book on CoffeeScript (available in both open source and updated traditional versions) and started doing real project in this small language — I absolutely positively love it! I’m glad I managed to avoid the infamous Blub Paradox. :-)
Our challenges and priorities are achieving sky-high scalability and military-level stability while maintaining the superb security standard that DocuSign has. These tasks are very stimulating (in a good way) for me as an engineer! No kidding, DocuSign is used by 48 million users, and it’s sending and signing 250,000 documents in 43 languages, every day.
In addition to being a part of the great team, I got to enjoy spectacular views of the Bay, Bay Bridge and Embarcadero from DocuSign San Francisco office (company was founded in Seattle, WA) along with a convenient commute and many other big company perks. Is this an end to my #startuplife chapter and a re-visit of #corporatelife one? Maybe.
Dude, I feel sorry for you to work with antediluvian tools. You should ditch ExpressJs, CoffeScript, and replace them with TypeScript and PartialJs, respectively.