🙂
Open to contracting or full time work!
Side Projects
2023
My toxic trait is rebuilding a site for my family, friends and I to run an oscars pool. This last go-around I built it in 2 days some of which was live during the event 😅 and it's my favorite iteration so far.
I use these opportunities to learn new tools and stacks. This year I got to extend my experience with:
- Supabase
- Vercel
- Remix
- Tailwind
And trying out some new tools like:
- drizzle-orm
- daisy.ui
Focusing on some of the new experience:
- Supabsae Row Based Access Control feature and managing policies in Postgres. Was a real nice experience, and simplifies the front-end a lot when not needing to worry about augmenting your queries with current user context.
- Supabase Auth was fairly straight forward and was interesting integrating in to a Remix app.
- daisy.ui made it really simple to build up a nice looking interface without much extra custom code. It ended up feeling a little like Material Design System which is p neat.
Check out the source code here: github.com/derekr/noms-cl…
Writing
2023
High level overview of building the experience for Lists on gowalla.com.
Awards
2019
Soon after launching our React Native app in the iOS App Store we were featured as the App of the Day.
Work Experience
2021 — 2023
Sacramento, CA
- Shipped multiple internal tools and integrations for business intelligence, content management and art pipelines.
- Shipped various user facing web products and managed the operation of the primary website gowalla.com using the Remix web framework, Apple Maps, Framer, Netlify and Github Actions.
- Managed operations of various services using Docker, Kubernetes on Google Cloud Platform.
- Established best practices, tooling and workflows around observing and monitoring our production systems using services like Sentry, Checkly and GCP Logging.
- Using the observability tooling was able to piroritize and execute various performance improvements across our NodeJS based GraphQL API.
- Intproduced Shape Up project management process and improved team cohesion and velocity in shipping.
2019 — 2021
Oakland, CA
- Helped rollout the Shape Up project management process.
- Worked closely with business partners to ship projects for our Registry product.
- Worked closely with data analytics team members to ship various experiements on our ecommerce store front.
- Lead initiatives to modernize aspects of our frontend infrastructure with a focus on testing practices, data access and state management.
- Was an engineering manager for a few engineers and supported them via weekly 1:1s, coaching and career advocacy.
2019 — 2019
San Francisco, CA
Started a greenfield mobile app initiative and helped bring to market our Apple and Android apps using React Native. We were a featured App of the Day!
- Shepparded initiatives on the engineering team with a focus on productivity such as introducing TypeScript and design tokens/system.
- Automated a majority of our mobile release process utilizing Azure DevOps and end-to-end testing with Detox.
- Worked closely with product and design to shape features, plan cycles and deliver features like our search and map views.
2015 — 2018
San Francisco, CA
- Managed on average 7 engineers at a time on teams like Risk, Security, Growth and Frontend
- Before becoming a manager, helped improve our SEO while on the growth team by auditing our open-graph tags, implementing suggested content and making it easier and less error prone for future engineers to introduce Open Graph changes.
- Lead Front End engineering for overhauling our Messages product. Worked with other engineers and Product Manager to break down the project and coordinated through shipping.
- Helped establish best practices and patterns in new React codebase through proposal docs, meetings/workshops and tooling like linting.
2015 — 2015
San Francisco, CA
- Proposed and managed introduction of new Node.js and React architecture for web products.
- Primary engineer on the Life Insurance calculator working closely with domain expert and Product Manager to help me internalize business impact and customer value. Advocated for and got buy-in for gender-neutral form input.
- Scrum Conductor for multiple projects helping engineers groom tasks and iterate on task estimation skills and process.