Currently responsible for the long-term migration of the front-end stack of an educational platform from Backbone.js to React.js. Responsibilities include breaking up functionality, providing constant communication of deliverable time estimates and blockers, as well as finding solutions to technological barriers encountered during the migration.

Senior Front End Engineer

Currently developing a Vue.js/GraphQL application for a company in the medical sector, while working on a React.js migration roadmap. Responsibilities include: Supporting architectural decision-making by participating in product meetings and producing tickets for the team, reviewing code changes to ensure best practices, and ensuring the tech stack being migrated to aligns with business needs.

JavaScript Architect

Acted as 1:1 coach and fullstack course mentor to students. Motivating & fostering best practices with students as they work to build project management skills, a strong portfolio, and the confidence to network and interview for jobs. Achievements include 100% student satisfaction, and produced over 10 different unique workshops on diverse coding topics with an average student rating of 9.5/10.

Full Stack Mentor & Course Instructor - Part Time

Developed a commerce application from scratch using a modern stack with Vue.js, Vuex, Nuxt.js, Apollo, GraphQL, Express.js, and Node.js. There, I supported the Mexico team on architectural decisions such as deciding the tech stack and tooling, as well as coaching the team on a quick ramp up for rapid Vue.js/GraphQL adoption. I also maintained a legacy Ember 2.x application while fixing various bugs and updating various parts of the application to modern standards without breaking browser compatibility.

Sr. Software Engineer

- Hospitality Web Application: As a Sr. Front-End Engineer & team mentor, I helped develop a hospitality wizard with React/Apollo/GraphQL components on a Hapi.js/GraphQL server. Responsibilities included mentoring the team on React and Front End best practices, enforcing testing guidelines, and improving code quality via code reviews
- Company Ad Platform & Conversion Area: As a Full-Stack Engineer, I developed multiple React/Redux UI components, & implemented various server side enhancements with Node/Express. Achievements include implementing Unit (Jest) and Automation (Selenium/Puppeteer) testing from scratch, and mentoring the team to foster Test Driven development best practices.

Full Stack Engineer

Acted as instructor/presenter in the Front End part of the Full Stack Web Developer Bootcamp made by Desafio Latam on Saturdays. Tasks include covering the entire course syllabus using material provided by Desafio Latam, supporting students, and custom tailoring the course content to student needs.

Front End Bootcamp  - Part Time

I participated in 3 separate projects here.

- Developed a farm automation and management iPad application for a Forbes 500 company in the agriculture sector. This application eliminated the need for constant micromanagement of individual farms and added precision agriculture intelligence which helped maximize profits and decrease losses. It was developed as a hybrid HTML5 application using Ionic/Cordova (to facilitate portability to android sometime in the future), AngularJS, Couchbase, and ArcGis. Responsibilities included coding the application’s front end, testing, setting up continuous integration, and proposing solutions to technological and performance barriers for the client’s needs.

- Developed a responsive website and individual, reusable components for an US company in the health sector. The main objectives of this were to create reusable site components which are maintainable, modernizing the site’s design, and making it’s design adapt to a wide variety of browsers, display sizes and devices. It was developed with Bootstrap, jQuery, and Modernizr. Responsibilities included coding components and setting up continuous integration.

- Developed a demo iOS application for a hospital. To be used as a tool for selling the application to the client, the app was to be used as a secure way of communicating hospital employees and patients. It was developed in Xamarin Forms as a multi-platform native application which could be ported to android effortlessly. Responsibilities included creating the app demo within a 4 week timespan.

Front End Developer

By far, my strongest skillset. I simply love JavaScript. And have done nothing more the past couple of years honing this skill. I find what many people find intolerable, quirky features of the language quite simply, fascinating. From closures, hoisting, prototypes, this/scope binding, design patterns, functional programming, classes, transpilers, you name it. I love it all, but above all else, I love expressing the love for it by explaining complicated JavaScript concepts in a simple fashion.

I have worked across a large variety of React apps over the years, from simple Front Ends using vanilla React, to Server Side Rendered React apps, to full blown scalable apps using things like Redux/Apollo GraphQL/React Native.

I have a particularly strong interest in building React apps the clean, mantainable, performant way. Be it by writing clean JSX, not relying on external libraries unless it's absolutely possible, avoiding non-performant patterns for react apps, etc.

As a fan of good UI/UX design, one of my core principles while building web applications is maintaining strong performance. Be it by making sure assets are loaded in the most efficient manner, adding critical path rendering, or finding JavaScript performance bottlenecks causing sites to run sluggish. Because what good is a site that looks pretty, but is frustrating to use? Also worth mentioning, is I'm a certified Mobile Web Specialist by Google, which includes mainly mobile and performance oriented qualifications.

I have quite a lot of experience in Node despite starting primarily as a front end developer. Building a back end in JavaScript, even when compared to full blown static languages like Java and C# just feels right, more agile.

I have built servers using nothing more than the native http module, to using libraries like Express and Hapi.js. Also, I have done a fair share of database work using NoSQL and SQL libraries such as MongoDB and Postgres. And more recently, I have done quite a a lot of GraphQL work, and even built an entire GraphQL back end and front end integration from scratch recently which implemented Redis caching.

Despite not having as much experience in Vue.js compared to my other frameworks, I managed to learn it rapidly thanks to my background in libraries like React and Angular.js on which Vue is strongly inspired from. I have worked on projects ranging from only Vue, to full blown Vue apps using the Server Side Rendered Nuxt stack, with Apollo GraphQL and Vuex for state management.

I have done large amounts of testing over the years. This includes the entire testing piramid rangin to Unit Tests, Integration Tests, and UI/Automation tests. Starting from older libraries like Jasmine.js, to more modern and extensible ones like Mocha and Jest. I have also tested a large amount of front tools included but not limited to: Angular 1 (Protactor), Backbone (Mocha), React (Enzyme), Node.js (Jest).

Also, I have done quite a fair amount of automation testing via Selenium using Webdriver.io and more recently, have moved to using Puppeteer from the official Chrome Team as it has proven far more powerful than even Selenium. All in all, I find testing quite enjoyable!

I am no stranger to mentorship, as I have participated as a private, and full time mentor at various places througout my career. Ranging from local, in-person classroom environment bootcamps, to private 1:1 mentorship through large established educational institutions like Thinkful, to career counseling.

I believe what makes me such a great mentor, other than my positive energetic attitude and patience, is possibly how much I am in love doing what I do. Which in turn translates to me always wanting to get other people to fall in love with coding as much as I do.

I am a complete nut for performance in web apps. And ever since I began my journey as a coder, I have strived to optimize my web applications as much as possible. It all began over 5 years ago while I was building a complicated agriculture automation mobile web app using mapping data and drones with Ionic Framework (Angular 1 + HTML5) which introduced a large amount of performance issues. Which I all had to fix using various techniques. And ever since then, I've fallen in love with writing clean, optimized applications.

Techniques I've applied to solve performance in web applications includes but is not limited to: implementing a critical rendering path, troubleshooting performance issues of browser rendering pipeline using the Chrome DevTools, improving load times via network resource prioritization, reduce CSS bottlenecks due to rendering anti-patterns, implemented caching via service workers, and much, much more.

The framework that started it all for me, I originally started my career as a web developer using Angular.js. I have quite a bit of experience in this, ranging from building large scale web applications, to semi-modern ones using Angular 1.5.x lifecycle components with Redux state management. And while Angular 1 might be an aging framework by today's standards, it still holds a place close to my heart for teaching me the fundamentals of modern web development.

Javascript Architect, UI/UX fan, & Performance and Clean Code Advocate

Sergei Garcia

A graphql wrapper for the popular JSONPlaceholder API.

JSONPlaceholder GraphQL

A full-stack jQuery/Node/Express/MongoDB blogging app that supports authentication. Built to serve as an annotated, tutorial application for beginners learning how to code.

Personal details

Sergei G.

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