Software Developer in Bellingham, WA, United States

As a startup trying to change the world, New Citizens is a platform striving to create collaborations.

With limited funding and a small team, an initial MVP has been created using lean production methodologies to limit waste and minimize the cost of necessary experimentation.

The architecture has been designed to be scalable from the beginning, to take advantage of viral momentum as soon as it starts, while the domain-driven design and automated tests allow for quick iteration of new ideas.

The creation of HTML emails pretty is not the most fun when you're dealing with nested tables and already-inlined CSS.

In 2016, I was working as a lead web developer on the marketing team of a small SaaS company, and I had to implement numerous HTML emails and email templates. After many error-prone hours of tedium, I decided there had to be a better way.

What started as a simple Gulp workflow to inline shared CSS styles turned in to something more when combined with the power of Jade templating mixins. By building on top of extensive research into archaic email client HTML rendering rules and testing results, the result was an honestly pleasant way to craft tested, responsive HTML emails.

In 2015, when my technical support team transitioned to supporting our SaaS platform's customers via chat, there were a few paint points. One of those was maintaining great internal customer support, without sacrificing top-notch external customer support.

With visual feedback provided by an IoT-like hardware device, it became less stressful to engage with fellow employees in-office, with peace-of-mind knowing that we did not ignore the incoming chats.

The hardware was built around a small AVR chip and communicated with the host computer over USB. A Python Flask server relayed messages to the hardware device. In turn, the server was updated by a small JavaScript monkey-patch for the Olark chat service web client, using the DOM MutationObserver API to minimize performance impact.