That is my classroom; it hasn't changed much. My field of study was Digital Media Art, and our course required us to present our projects on a page hosted by the school. In the early 2000s, information as art is the thing, and we created art used mediums like Arduino boards, breadboards, sensors, HTML, CSS, Javascript, and ActionScript. That's how everything started for me.
For the past 17 years, equipped with the most valuable lesson I learned from my program—critical thinking—I have been honing my skills and learning from peers and mentors across various companies. Finally, over the last three years, I have had the opportunity to mentor others and give back.
My last position was at Inxeption. It is a B2B ecommerce platform that lasted seven years. I was the number ten hire and we grew to about 250 employees at its peak. I get to experience a business go from a small business to a mature medium sized business. That's where I got the majority of my cross functional team cooperation experiences from. I had to work with a lot of teams because my expertise with the platform is valued by people. My name would pop up in a lot of conversations. It was an honor to be like that person, but at the same time it is bad for the business because we need redundancy, so I do as much as possible to share the knowledge I possess.
I was hired as Senior front end development engineer, working with a designer, a backend architect, and a product manager, we were able to have a product go into market within the first month after I joined. We signed our first client the month after. I lead the effect to move common css, components into another repository so we can use it as a git module in other applications. Over the time, we have quite a comprehensive list of components and css that are used in various applications in the platform. It was truly a fun experience because I am doing what I enjoyed and was supported by my teammates. We learned to optimize code to make it performant, learned to use d3 library, and highcharts to make graphs and charts, fine tuned our internal toolings so that deployment doesn't need to be handled manually. We were able to deploy an application to a new server with a few clicks in a management app that was developed using our common component library and the internal tooling we created.
Almost three years ago, I was promoted to director, front end development. I was already leading a small team locally before that, mentoring the junior developers, doing code reviews, and making sure knowledge is spread out in the product organization. After my promotion, I officially led the team in the United States and another team offshore. During the time at Inxeption, I worked on six different applications including inxeption.com, we used react, nextjs, graphql, sass, and various open source software as our main tech stack.
These are the skills I use almost everyday to solve interesting challenges.
A forced graph for everything software development: