Personal details

Hugh G. - Remote front-end developer

Hugh G.

Based in: 🇺🇸 United States
Timezone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) (UTC-4)

Summary

Hi, my name’s Hugh Guiney (🗣 GUY-knee). I’m a UX Developer, which means I design and code thoughtful digital products. I’ve worked with organizations of all sizes, from startups to SMBs to household names. In my spare time I build open-source software, play fighting games, and perform improv comedy.

Companies I’ve worked with

🏃‍♂️ Runkeeper
💚 Oxfam
🦁 Publicis Sapient
🏦 Citizens Bank
🎮 WB Games
👟 Reebok
📰 The Boston Globe
🏙 The City of Boston

Services

Development

  • HTML5, CSS3, & JavaScript (ES6+)
  • React— incl. Redux, Context, & Hooks
  • Node.js
  • Gatsby
  • WordPress
  • Shopify
  • SEO¹ & Performance

Design

  • UI/UX (Look & Feel)
  • Information Architecture
  • Components & Design Systems
  • Usability/Accessibility
  • Copyediting
  • Logos & Brand Identity
  • Responsive Design

The hughx Advantage:

🐖 Economical.

With traditional app development, there are two main phases: design and development.

First, the designer creates mockups—a series of pictures of what the app will look like. Then the developer translates those pictures into actual code. This duplicates the work of the designer, costing you time and money. Often the designer lacks technical knowledge. At best, this makes the developer’s job harder. At worst this means design revisions. Either way it means more time and more money.

There’s a better way. As a hybrid designer–developer, I don’t do mockups—only functional prototypes. That way you can feel what the product will be like, rather than just imagine it. And with fewer cooks in the kitchen, you get to launch and iterate faster.

♿️ Empathetic.

50% of the world’s population isn’t online yet¹, but they soon will be. As this happens, they will largely arrive by way of mobile, not desktop. And not on the iPhone 11, either—more like the iPhone from 2011. This means sites and apps designed for Westerners with the latest tech will break for the rest of the world.

I believe the Internet should be for everyone. I keep accessibility, performance, and user friendliness top-of-mind at every stage of development. This helps your product reach the broadest possible audience. It’s not just good karma, it’s good business.

🏛 Engineered.

Just because you’re moving fast doesn’t mean you need to sacrifice quality. Today’s MVP is tomorrow’s legacy codebase. Left unpaid, technical debt manifests as bottlenecks. New features start to break old ones. The app slows to a crawl, increasing bounce rate and costing you sales. Current employees get pulled away from product work to help onboard new employees.

Contracting with hughx is an insurance policy against code rot. Modular functions, unit tests, and detailed documentation all come standard. If your customers don’t thank you, your dev team will.

¹ Best practices only. I do not guarantee search engine ranking.
² Source: Statistics on ITU

Work Experience

Senior Software Engineer, Web Frontend
Feed Media Group | May 2021 - Present
Node.js
Git
GitHub
TypeScript
npm
Jira
React
Confluence
JavaScript
Webpack
Material-UI
GraphQL
Apollo

Music-as-a-Service company; pre-clears songs for commercial use in apps & websites. Mostly work on new products across all stages of lifeycle, from concept to final delivery. Developed novel algorithm to match Spotify tracks against internal library. Introduced UX research practices. Established front-end coding standards. Interviewed candidates. Architected modern, scalable, testable codebases. Engineering team quickly regarded my work as gold standard in company’s portfolio of products, becoming template for all new products. “Culture Award” recipient for contributing to positive work environment.

  • Roles: API Design, Code Review, Content Production, Front-end Development, Interviewing, Maintenance, Requirements Gathering, Technical Writing, UI Design, UX Design, UX Research
  • Tech: Git, GraphQL, JavaScript (ES6+), TypeScript
  • Tools: Apollo, Balsamiq, BEM, Confluence, Figma, GitHub, Google Docs, Jira, Material UI / MUI, NPM, Node.js, React, Slack, Visual Studio Code, Webpack
Open-Source Maintainer
RedBlue | May 2016 - Present
XML
HTML5
CSS3
Startups
JavaScript
RDFa
Semantic Web
Open Source Software

RedBlue allows content producers to create “hypervideo” (interactive online video), such as choose-your-own-story films. This is achieved by annotating videos with time-based links and UI using our open standard, HVML (Hypervideo Markup Language). Hypervideo provides a more immersive experience than regular video, offering higher audience engagement rates, more rewatchability, better brand recall with ads, and a unique selling point for filmmakers. RedBlue is currently in the prototype phase. With a current team size of one, I handle everything from programming, to interface design, to marketing.

RedBlue:

  • Roles: API Design, UI Design, UX Design, Frontend Development, Backend Development, Video Production, Video Encoding, Animation, Marketing
  • Tech: JavaScript (ES6+), Web Components, HTML5, CSS3, MediaSource Extensions, MPEG-DASH, WebM, AJAX, Responsive Design, Git
  • Tools: Jekyll, Polymer, Atom, Adobe Premiere Pro, GitHub, NPM, Facebook Ads

HVML:

  • Roles: Language Design, Specification Writing, Frontend Development, Backend Development
  • Tech: JavaScript (ES6+), GraphQL, XML, JSON-LD, RDFa, Microdata, HTTP, REST, Git
  • Tools: React, Gatsby, Node.js, Jest, Istanbul, Travis CI, Codecov, GitHub, Atom, NPM

Education

Boston Latin Academy
High school diplomaGeneral Education
Sep 2000 - Sep 2006

Personal Projects

2016
Video streaming
Web Components
JavaScript
2013
XML
XML Schema

Certifications & Awards

Runner-up
TechCrunch Disrupt NY Hackathon | May 2017