Marnus Weststrate

Flix Premiere is an enterprise streaming platform for independent film. It's available in the US and UK, and 250,000+ users have signed up. As VP of engineering, I oversaw the design and development teams, comprising in-house developers and various contractors, in developing video streaming apps covering 19 different platforms across web, mobile, and smart TV/OTT.

I wrote the bulk of the code for the client apps, including a React web app, React Native iOS and Android apps, and smart TV/OTT apps for Apple TV, Android TV, LG, Samsung, Xbox, and many more. Because we used react-native-web, most of the UI components and business logic can be reused across all these apps, which improves maintainability. We used React Apollo to implement a single API client shared across all the apps for normalized, client-side data caching.

The admin and CMS back end allows for effective content management of thousands of films and actors. We also added integrated release scheduling, video ingest and encoding, email campaigns, and blog and press release management. The back end is written in PHP using the Laravel framework, and it uses an event sourcing and CQRS architecture.

This library provides time zone support for the popular date-fns JavaScript library and currently has more than 2,000,000 downloads per week from npm.

Working with ISO date strings and JavaScript dates is easy when all times are displayed in a user's local time in the browser. The difficulty comes when working with a local time zone that differs from the current system's time zone; for example, on a Node.js server or when showing the time of an event in a specific time zone, such as an event in Los Angeles at 8:00 PM PST, regardless of where a user resides.

In this library, I used the JavaScript Intl API in a novel way to enable dates to be formatted for any time zone without bundling any time zone database files. This solution keeps the browser code bundle size to a minimum.

A React component to animate the replacement of one element with another. While ReactCSSTransitionGroup does a great job of animating changes to a list of components and can even be used to animate the replacement of one item with another, proper handling of the container height in the latter case is not built-in. I designed this component to do exactly that with an API closely following the ReactCSSTransitionGroup API. This library currently has more than 13,000 downloads per week from npm.

Property Frontier is a web app that helps property investors take control of their property portfolios and choose the best properties to buy. It provides detailed financial modeling for projecting investment property performance over any number of years with parameters that can be varied over time.

I built the full-stack app single-handedly, from the ground up, using the JavaScriptMVC framework, Zend PHP, and CouchDB. This was the first major web project I worked on with a chartered accountant.

When server-side apps were the norm and client-side JavaScript frameworks for building client-heavy apps were only emerging, we achieved fast response times by running all the app logic in the client after initial data fetching. The app logic included financial modeling and projections.