Participated under NDA in the development of 5-6 different start-ups and other client work fielding projects ranging from front-end to Kubernetes, React Native to Bash scripting, distributed-ledger and more.

Self-employed

Remote placement from Chicago to Nashville. Worked with product team, UI and back-end developers to built out new back-office application to power the organizations main sales activities. Trained junior developers while helping built and migrate static sites to AWS and stretched into API development using a Node.js back-end.

Senior Software Engineer

Joined a team of 8 engineers, built front-end SPA used to create 8 back-office applications within the company. Built e-commerce front-end for Sales department used by hundreds of reps daily and also built cycle counting system with cross-platform front-end and Bluetooth scanner helping enable the company move into a larger warehouse as it was expanding. Assisted in hiring process to increase the size of the tech team until the company was acquired for 325M by Nordstrom.

Lead Front-End Developer

Created and rolled out first single-page application at the company, used as a front-end for millions of consumer-facing products across Sears' brands including Sears.com and Kmart.com, among others. Trained junior engineers how to write clean, maintainable code. Helped train others during the Agile transition.

Senior Front-End Engineer

Dates approximate. Built front-end location-based hotel search solution, assisted in front-end brand redesign for Orbitz, CheapTickets and sister properties. Trained UI engineers on-location in Argentina. Assisted in integrating with third-parties and helped Internationalization efforts.

Front-End Software Engineer

Worked on a team of three front-end software engineers developing the benefits portal website and adopting Open Source JavaScript technologies into the company. Designed and developed system to Internationalize the benefits portal to French and trained on-site in Canada during the translation. All work had to comply with accessibility standards of the US government.

Front-End Software Developer

Built Accenture's 401(k) plan by customizing pre-defined COBOL software modules and integrating them with the 401(k) benefits administration website. Automated Website testing and trained off-shore associates in testing and test plan execution.

Benefits Analyst

I've been building static sites for fun and profit since Dreamweaver 3 was released. In 2013 I started learning and using Jekyll, and have relationships with many of their core developent team. I'm very fast at creating static sites and can create them pixel-perfect from the ground up starting with nothing more than a PDF design comp. Looking for something more scalable, I've created the most popular self-hosted Hugo theme and released it under the GPL.

I tought myself HTML starting with version 2 and am a whiz with semantic markup, having coded HTML in a personal and professional capacity for quite some time now. CSS has played a major role in all work since, and I'm familiar with both obscure and mainstream layout techniques, development patterns such as BEM and SMCSS and can write CSS in Sass, Less and Stylus.

Picked up my first JavaScript book at the age of 23 to teach myself how to create a booking inquiry form for a vacation rentals website I contracted as a young freelancer. Since then I've had thousands of hours of professional experience coding JavaScript of all kinds.

I have experience building WordPress sites personally and as a freelancer. It's not something I do every day but I am a fan of PHP and have developed my own WordPress performane plug-in after speaking about WordPress at WordCamp Ubud 2017.

I've well versed in how to optimize any website to both increase crawl frequency but also to place it near the top of search on every major search engine outside Baidu. I can show you with numbers how I took a site with no traffic up to 70K hits per month using good SEO practices and how I can get a page listed on the first page of DuckDuckGo without any black hat in less than 2 days for 2-3 word keyphrases.

I've been self-hosting my own code for more than a year after gaining sufficient knowledge of how to stand-up and administer my own Linux boxes on VPSs with first Digital Ocean and then later using CloudFlare and Lightsail.

I've been using node as a tool to manage dependencies and build scalable applications with fast development pipelines to deliver sooner with less bugs. I've got a grip on dozens of libraries and and able to use NPM to piece together an entire development pipeline from scratch.

Though I prefer Vue.js and more minimalistic libraries I've worked with teams on several large projects with tight deadlines using React and Webpack. I've given talks on how to use it isomorphically as well as talks on the SEO aspects, in addition to just programming it. My React Native framework was once one of the most popular on the planet.

Anytime a processing pipeline or automated testing is needed I'm quick to set-up a highly optimized CI/CD pipeline to manage automation of everything from code quality to deployments to coverage reporting.

I've built or helped build about 10 backbone-based applications using the Chaplin architecture. I never bit on Angular or Ember. Then along came React and Flux.

As an early adopter of jQuery I used it to build dozens of UIs before beginning to use it with Backbone.js, back when Backbone was still a thing. Since then I've used jQuery to create some simple, stylish effects using its wide array of plug-ins to speed of develpment of customer sites.

I've used coffee script in everyting from personal projects to enterprise web applications build on Backbone and Ruby on Rails. I haven't touched it in a few years but I'm still a fan.

UI-UX / WebOps / SRE / React / TypeScript / JavaScript

Josh Habdas

Retro dark theme for Hugo with over 50K downloads. Includes BPG image support using Wasm.

After Dark

React Native app for WLPN 105.5 FM Lumpen Radio Chicago. Broadcasted live for 4 years.

Personal details

Josh H.

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