Work Experiences

If you're looking at this page trying to figure out what I've done for work, here's some info:

Recent Software work

At Pexels, as the first engineering hire, I completed a fully functional server-rendered React frontend that supported contributing clients (photographers) as well as paying customers. This was well before popular frameworks such as Next made this more widely accessible, and required a lot of creative problem solving. Completion of this project spurred the acquisition by Canva.

With that project complete, I was tasked with building an app to support the diverse Pexels userbase. Utilizing React Native, I was able to release something that quickly accounted for 30% of all uploads to Pexels – one of the largest free stock photography sites on the web. Continued efforts have kept this app highly stable (99.5% crash free) and highly rated (4.9+ iOS).

I recently spearheaded an effort to convert the entire app codebase to TypeScript. It had a net positive impact of reducing the (already small) crash rate for our users by 250%.

Consultancy work

Before that, I partnered with a Toronto-based consultancy. I was asked to rapidly improve a high-profile hotel chain's booking flow (built in Angular). We built a web check-in service from the ground up in 4 weeks, then jumped right in to overhauling the user profile page, where I took the lead in untangling the existing spaghetti and transforming an ugly appendage of a feature into a beautiful experience.

Going further back in time

Specializing in front-end development, I helped DuckDuckGo complete a substantial redesign in 2014. That redesign basically meant scrapping all of the existing HTML/CSS and rebuilding it from the ground-up. DuckDuckGo now uses SASS/Compass to build their stylesheets, and a lot of my work has since been open-sourced.

Prior to joining the company full-time, I did a bunch of open-source contracting work, including an earlier redesign of the DuckDuckGo Community Platform, which was a custom-built user platform (including a blog, forum, and translation system) written mostly in Perl, using a very obscure tempting language for the markup called XSlate Kolon.

I also spent a lot of my time troubleshooting weird javascript bugs, which is fun.

Prior to DuckDuckGo I worked for a marketing company by the name of SearchKings. I don't think I ever received a formal title, but the closest description might be "website mechanic", as a large chunk of my responsibility was to fix and improve existing client sites in order to enhance ongoing marketing campaigns. I had to wear a lot of hats here because I was the fifth employee and the first technical hire.

Working with existing sites meant dealing with a wide variety of different content management systems, including but not limited to WordPress, Joomla, Perch, Drupal, Django, and some other really nasty looking PHP libraries.

Does it sound like I've done anything that you need help with? Cool. Contact me and let's see if we could work together.