Colin Douglas — Software Engineer · Ecommerce · Dot Foods

Search shouldn't be a spelling bee.

Typo-tolerant product search on Dot Foods' ecommerce site, so “chiken nugets” finds chicken nuggets instead of a dead end.

Contributing to

183,563 fewer no-result searches

2025 year-to-date vs 2024 (−29.3%). Rolled out Feb 1, 2025.

Estimated value

$53,763/yr^† net-margin opportunity

What if we don't carry it?

When a customer searches a product code that isn't in the Dot catalog, AI matching finds the closest Dot item instead of returning nothing. It supports a major Dot Foods ecommerce initiative to reduce no-result searches.

Product-code searches

11.6% lower no-result rate

First 21 weeks vs the prior 21 weeks · external visitors searching 11-, 12- and 14-digit codes.

Estimated value

$349,290/yr^† net-margin opportunity

Mornings, fixed.

Reduced all server-side errors on public production by 74.3%, and fixed the recurring morning connection timeouts.

Server-side errors

−74.3% all 5xx responses

Per 1M requests on public Production hosts: 5,531 before → 1,424 after.

Recurring morning outages

06:00 ✓ fixed with automated SQL Server maintenance

80+ hours → ~8.

The importer that builds the full catalog XML for the ecommerce site now loads the same full catalog in a tenth of the time, through concurrency, parallel processing and SQL optimization. I also found telemetry overhead that was triggering unnecessary Azure Function scale-outs.

Full catalog load

~8 hrs down from 80+ (−90%)

Azure Functions

~3× throughput · 0 extra scale-outs

~$1,400/mo in Azure costs avoided

Ticket in.
PR out.

An AI software-development orchestration product. A Jira ticket moves through AI agents and comes out as a pull request ready for human review, with a human in the loop at every step.

1. Jira ticket
2. AI agents product owner · business analyst · architecture · developer · security · QA
3. Pull request

1. It started as an idea
2. It became a major Dot Foods IT initiative
3. Today adopted by a Dot Foods team, with its own roadmap & support