Michael Cola

Senior Software Engineer - Ruby on Rails · React · Postgres

About Me

Technically, I specialize in Rails + Postgres backends with React frontends. Practically, I specialize in making the hard change easy, whether that’s an optimization in ActiveRecord, a query refactor, or guiding a team through shifting priorities.

Projects View all →

Integrating Event Streaming with Work Breakdown Structure — Procore

When Procore began moving toward service-oriented architecture, the Budget team faced a major performance bottleneck. Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) data was no longer directly queryable from the database — instead, the Budget tool had to fetch it through a public service layer and merge it at runtime, slowing report response times from seconds to frustratingly long waits. The solution: stream WBS events into Kafka, ingest them into a Budget-owned WBS table, and query that table directly in reports. This allowed the Budget tool to remain isolated from the WBS domain while restoring performance.

Advanced Forecasting - Procore

Customers needed a way to predict costs month-to-month across the lifecycle of a project. While some expenses follow predictable patterns, others trend up or down, and being able to forecast these curves helps project managers spot budget issues before they happen. Advanced Forecasting extended the Configurable Budget framework to let users distribute costs over time using multiple spread models: Front-loaded, Back-loaded, Bell Curve, or Linear.

Configurable Budgeting Tool - Procore

Procore’s legacy Budget tool was so slow that customers jokingly called it a “coffee report”: you could click “load” and have time to grab coffee before it rendered. Customers needed a way to see real-time financial health across disparate tools — costs, revenue, contracts, labor, and more — in a single, customizable, and performant view. Our team rebuilt the tool from the ground up, introducing a new API-driven backend and a React frontend that transformed Budget from a static report into a dynamic, configurable powerhouse.

References View all →