Blush is a tool that allows people to create, mix, and customize illustrations from artists around the world. We're working on bringing illustrations to everyone, so that people in marketing, social media, and content creation can tell their stories in a creative way.

Co-Founder

Worked on projects to improve how developers interact with designers.

Lead Software Engineer

Working on the Hulu web experience, from account management to show browsing & discovery.

Senior Software Developer

Lead the front end engineering team on developing ChowNow's latest consumer product, Discover (https://eat.chownow.com). Introduced new technologies to the team (React, Redux, Webpack, PWA best practices) and architected the platform to scale well as more features were requested from product teams. Focus on performance and clean code. 

* Migrated Discover to React and re-architected the platform.
* Decoupled front-end application from back-end API, allowing it to be developed and deployed as a standalone application
* Introduced redux-saga to deal with side-effects, which helped keep both Redux actions & components pure and maintainable
* Worked on moving Discover application towards a PWA, including introducing a service worker to provide limited offline support / better load times. 
* Built unit testing infrastructure on Jest
* Improved application performance 10x after introducing React, and reduced CI builds from
~10min average to ~3min average
* Restructured front-end hiring process and helped introduce more cohesive development
workflow
* Proposed and executed the move to a monorepo git structure and worked on scripts/tools to streamline that workflow. Created initial scaffolding for sharing scripts/modules across projects.

Principal Front End Engineer

* Core member in developing flagship product, Nerve Center, built on React + Redux. The Nerve Center platform continuously aggregates and analyzes data across 2M+ digital and traditional data sources to construct timely, usable business insights.
* Help maintain and add new features to new API, built on Koa with Mongo + Mongoose as the data store & ODM.
* Maintain & add features to data visualization library built on D3 + Backbone
* Create & maintain Ansible playbooks to help automate deployment
* Containerize applications using Docker

Software Engineer

Developed several large, performant React applications at small to large sized organizations. Experienced with performance optimizations, application structuring, React component patterns, and tools that are commonly used in the React ecosystem (react router, redux, webpack, storybook, jest, enzyme to name a few). 

I've been developing applications in Next.js for years, and have worked closely with the development team. There's also a case study about how I helped lead the efforts for Hulu's Next.js work, visible here: https://nextjs.org/case-studies/hulu

Most of the applications I've developed in React have used Redux for state management when prop drilling becomes a concern. I'm a strong believer in starting with React state and moving to Redux when React no longer makes sense. I'm very comfortable with structuring Redux stores (normalizing & deduping data, namespacing redux modules, creating efficient selectors with reselect). I also am familiar with tools that are used in the Redux ecosystem, such as redux-saga for dealing with side effects, and redux-thunk. 

My build tool of choice for React applications is Webpack. Unlike most people, I enjoy configuring Webpack and adding plugins that improve application & developer efficiency. I've used Webpack for code-splitting in a React application (most commonly route-level splitting), opting in to CSS modules, and bundle size analysis and reduction. I'm also familiar with create-react-app's opinionated webpack configuration.

As a full-time front-end engineer, JavaScript is my bread and butter. I'm also knowledgeable in bringing JavaScript to the server-side world as well, through Node.js and frameworks like Koa and Express. Over the years I have built applications on a variety of JavaScript frameworks - jQuery, Backbone, AngularJS, and now React. I stay up to date on latest ECMAScript standards / proposals and am well-versed in ES6 and ES7. 

Jest is my go-to tool for building application tests. I've now moved two large teams off of other tools like Mocha and Proxyquire into Jest, and have created test suites for hundreds of components. I'm comfortable with Snapshot testing and how to make effective use of them, as well as the various powerful ways to mock modules. 

HTML & CSS are the bread and butter of web application development. I am very familiar with the HTML5 spec, and comfortable writing browser friendly CSS to make beautiful interfaces. I'm up to date on the latest layout tools for CSS, such as the CSS grid spec.  

Personal details

Zack T.

Summary

Technical skills

Work Experience

Education