The remainder of my time at Twitter was spent working on Feather, the design system for ads tools and internal tools. My primary focus was developer efficiency—both the efficiency of developers on the team and the efficiency of our internal customers.

Highlights:

• I overhauled our component build system and managed to get build times from 6 minutes (!!!) down to about 20 seconds.

• I introduced a number of autofixing lint rules that helped contributors avoid common mistakes and antipatterns, thus removing the need to discuss these things in code review.

• I built a Flowtype to TypeScript conversion process that allowed us to migrate a massive Flow codebase over to TypeScript module by module, and with no negative impact on our customers.

• I introduced the team to a light agile process, replacing our home baked task tracking setup with something more focused on team accountability and accurate project estimation.

Highlights:

• I helped bring multi-destination carousels to the web, thus providing advertisers with a new enticing ad format and growing ad spend.

• I fixed a number of accessibility issues in the Twitter preroll video player and introduced a new way of displaying the video content attached to the preroll ad.

Backstory: Due to headcount limitations on a team I intended to join, I was temporarily loaned to the Twitter Web team to help them build new ad formats. Those months ended up being an invaluable deep dive into react-native-web and accessibility on the web. It was quite surreal working on a web app that served millions of customers.

Once I had helped get a few ad formats projects out the door, the headcount I was consuming was moved over to my intended team and I joined them fulltime.

Highlights:

• Elevated teammates' output through pairing and mentoring.

• Prototyped a TypeScript-based stack for the future of Health Tools. The project that spawned from this prototype is still in use today at Twitter and it powers a number of critical Health tools.

• Botmaker 2 rescued from development hell and shipped. Botmaker is the front-line tool for fighting spam and abuse at Twitter. The old codebase was Ruby on Rails and jQuery and it was a ticking time bomb. The Botmaker 2 project commenced a year before I arrived but had been stuck in an incomplete state for some time. In a period of about a month and a half, I rebuilt the entire frontend using Feather, our internal design system, as the basis for the design.

Highlights:

• I learned React on the job and developed a deep knowledge of webpack and React internals.

• I singlehandedly designed and built the entire Smyte user interface and worked closely with customers to deliver the features they needed in the UI.

I joined Smyte in 2015 as their first hire. I was brought on to design the fledgling web UI for the product. In the early days, Pete Hunt, our CEO, would implement my designs. As CEO duties started to consume more of Pete’s time, I started to take on more and more frontend work. Within a few months, my design workflow shifted to a code-first approach and I started digging into frontend tooling so I could iterate more quickly.

In the years that followed, I collaborated closely with both our customers and our analysts to build out the features they needed in the UI. I learned the ins and outs of the entire frontend pipeline and developed a deep knowledge of webpack and React.