Why hire me?

Working at ThinkReservations as a Front-end developer has been a new challenge. The reason for this is the small size of the company, which has required me to put on many different hats. I have been working primarily on the main product, but as the only current Front-End Developer at the company, aside from the CEO, I have also helped on the Marketing sites where I introduced Tailwind to simplify our styling solution while modernizing the overall look of the site. I also dug into our legacy Rails apps where I brushed up on my ERB skills when the situation called for it.

After initially working with AspireIQ as a consultant and re-building their marketing sites, I joined as a full-time employee on the product team. There I worked on one of the most mission-critical parts of the company, the post-campaign analytics dashboard. In this project, I built a variety of sub-pages that offered different views into the performance of posts. This ranged from a variety of graphs (which offer side by side comparison to different sets of filters) to a table view, or a view of each post with metrics attached. I also introduced Storybook as well as Jest and the React Testing Library for front-end testing which was previously not done at all.

Over the years I have completed a wide range of freelance projects. I have had the ability to work with some really awesome clients like AspireIQ, Level Up Tutorials and CBS. At times this has been my full time source of income, at other times consulting has been a side project or put on pause. I have done this on and off since first learning how to program.

Lately I have been very focused on JAMstack development for my consulting.

As a Thinkful mentor, I met with students weekly and coached them through the program to ensure their success. During these one-on-one video calls, I assisted the students with a variety of things, from jumping into their code and squashing bugs, to reviewing their resume, all the way to dealing with imposter syndrome. It is my job to make sure they become the most qualified candidates they can be by the time they graduate. This role was very exciting because it forced me to stay on my A-game and allowed me the opportunity to meet new developers who I am still in contact with to this day and continue to mentor. During my time there, I was able to learn several topics in great depth by explaining them to dozens of people every week.

Technologies Taught:

I was hired to replace the sole front-end developer on the Architecture team, one of my first decisions was to remove a very uncommon react boilerplate in favor of NextJS, a decision I think benefited the project long after I left. As part of the Architecture team, I was tasked with creating the front-end of Central, an application for measuring the effectiveness of all of Amex’s programming teams. In addition it was responsible for tracking the flow of data through all of Amex’s applications. For this, I introduced the visx library (D3 primitives as react components) and used it to build various interactive data visualizations that directors could use to get the full picture. In this role, I also helped expand the frontend team by interviewing prospects and training a new hire.

Our team was one of the first at the company to be using React JS, and we were the first to introduce GraphQL at American Express. Because of this, I had the opportunity to train other teams on its use. All of this was done in an incredibly short span of 7 months.

I started at U-Haul as a manual tester in Quality Assurance, and by the time I had left I was a Software Development Engineer in Testing. When I first started there they had no test automation, and I was only just a few months into teaching myself how to program. So I decided to start wrapping our applications in test harnesses using Ruby, and a few months later I had a team of people I was training and partially project managing. As the team grew I was able to work on more ambitious things, and I implemented a dashboard for test running and monitoring the results. Historical data could be compared using data visualizations built in D3 and eventually visx using React. The dashboard also integrated with Slack, sending messages to the user when their test completed. After that, I decided I wanted to continue building interfaces using React, and because of this I knew I would have to leave U-Haul as all our applications outside of the one I built for testing were in C# and Angular apps.