LogRock

A tale of two companies, really. The early days were some of the best engineering work of my career. The later days… well, every startup has to grow up eventually.

The Company

LogRock started as a compliance software for the trucking industry - document storage, analysis, inspection reminders, that kind of thing. Trucking has a mountain of regulatory paperwork, and LogRock helped companies stay on top of it.

But compliance software alone wasn’t printing money, and since the end goal was always insurance anyway, they pivoted. LogRock became a trucking insurance company powered by the compliance data they’d been collecting. Makes sense strategically, even if it changed the nature of the work.

The Early Days

This was hardcore engineering with some of the best people I’ve worked with. Complex problems, elegant solutions, the kind of work that makes you excited to open your laptop in the morning.

The Quote System

I built a scalable quote system driven by finite state machines. Insurance quoting is surprisingly complex - there are dozens of paths a quote can take depending on driver history, vehicle types, coverage needs, and a million other variables. The FSM approach kept it maintainable as the business logic inevitably got more complicated.

The system served three different agencies and hit a conversion rate 6x above industry benchmark. When your quote flow converts that well, people notice.

CI/CD Pipeline

Set up the entire deployment infrastructure using GitHub Actions, Terraform, and Vercel. Parallel deploys finishing in under 2 minutes. The kind of pipeline where you push to main and go grab coffee knowing it’ll be in production before you’re back.

Email Template System

Created a modular email templating tool that powered over 150 marketing campaigns plus all transactional emails. Before this, email templates were scattered everywhere, inconsistent, and a pain to update. After? One source of truth, reusable components, happy marketing team.

AI Initiatives

Led the company’s early AI experiments - built a custom ChatGPT client for sales reps to help with customer interactions, and set up Devin.ai for the engineering team. This was before everyone and their grandmother had an AI strategy.

The Later Days

As the company matured and the insurance pivot took hold, the work changed. Most of what I was building became forms and tables. Important stuff for the business, but not exactly the kind of engineering puzzles that get your blood pumping.

Forms. Tables. More forms. Tables about forms. Forms to edit tables.

You get the idea.

Why I Left

When your daily work shifts from “interesting technical challenges” to “yet another CRUD form,” it’s time to evaluate. I’m grateful for the experience and the people, but I need problems that make me think. No hard feelings - companies evolve, and sometimes you evolve in a different direction.

Related

• LogRock.com - Website - The marketing site I built
• React - Primary framework
• CI/CD - Pipeline architecture
• GitHub Actions - Automation backbone