Allen Lai
Verified Expert in Engineering
Front-end Developer
Allen is a software engineer with several years of experience in full-stack web development. This experience includes delivering solutions for enterprises like Microsoft and Booz Allen Hamilton (a Fortune 500 management and IT consulting firm) as well as teaching programming at the Make School. In his free time, Allen makes frequent open-source contributions to Mattermost and GitLab. Before focusing on web development, Allen built and launched a few of his iOS apps on the App Store.
Portfolio
Experience
Availability
Preferred Environment
MacOS, Git
The most amazing...
...contribution that I've made was to an open-source project, Mattermost; I was recognized as the MVP of the month and invited to their conference in the Bahamas.
Work Experience
Software Engineer
Microsoft
- Used Angular/TypeScript, .NET Core/C#, and Azure to build web apps for Microsoft Enterprise Services relationship managers to better support and deliver professional services to their enterprise customers.
- Implemented event-based communication with Azure Service Bus to maintain data consistency across teams.
- Worked closely with customer support to respond to issues for users and fix them in a permanent and scalable way.
Software Engineer Consultant
Booz Allen Hamilton
- Built the front end of a prototype web app with React to demonstrate the business value derived by a serverless cloud data lake, which resulted in winning a $500,000 option to further build the demo and being awarded an 18-month contract.
- Developed a front-end application for the USCIS (the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) to help them manage their DevSecOps.
- Constructed front-end prototype web apps to win government contracts for Booz Allen.
iOS Summer Academy Lead Instructor
Make School
- Directly mentored a group of 13 students and managed their projects from brainstorming to App Store launch.
- Taught students the fundamental of programming and iOS development skills.
- Encouraged students to keep learning despite a quite steep learning curve.
Software Engineer Intern
MicroStrategy
- Created an object tagging feature prototype similar to macOS Finder’s file tagging feature with OS X programming for their enterprise software product.
- Tracked and fixed bugs in Jira to improve their product for Q4 2016 release.
- Created a tagging similar to one on Finder on their file management system.
Experience
Social Benefits Navigator
https://socialbenefitscalculator.web.app/Mattermost: Open-source, Self-hosted Slack Alternative
https://developers.mattermost.com/contribute/mvp/• Contributed by taking on 15 GitHub issues to merged PRs using React, React Native, Redux and Go.
• Was recognized as an MVP contributor and won the following award: https://developers.mattermost.com/contribute/mvp/
• Wrote unit tests with Jest for React components, E2E tests with Cypress, and Testify with Go.
GitLab Open-source Contribution
• Worked with staff using Vue.js/Vuex, Apollo/GraphQL, and Ruby on Rails.
Project URL:
• https://gitlab.com/dashboard/issues?scope=all&state=closed&assignee_username=allenlai18
Word by Word
https://word-by-word-70ccf.web.app/Technologies: React, Redux, Firebase Cloud Functions
Skills
Languages
JavaScript, TypeScript, Go, HTML, CSS, C#, GraphQL, Java 8, Swift, TypeScript 3, Java
Frameworks
Redux, JSON Web Tokens (JWT), .NET, React Native, Ruby on Rails 5, Jest, Angular, gRPC, Express.js
Libraries/APIs
React, Node.js, REST APIs, React Redux, Protobuf
Other
Full-stack Development, OAuth, Software Architecture, Technical Leadership, Back-end, Full-stack, Software Design, Leadership, Front-end, Programming, Firebase Cloud Functions, Apollo, Scraping
Tools
Git, GitHub, Mattermost, BigQuery, Cloud Dataflow, Apache Beam, Webpack
Paradigms
Desktop Web Design
Platforms
Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
Storage
Google Cloud, Google Cloud Spanner
Education
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science
University of Maryland, College Park - College Park, MD, United States
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