Richard Plotkin
Verified Expert in Engineering
JavaScript Developer
White Plains, NY, United States
Toptal member since May 27, 2016
Richard is a distinguished engineer with over 25 years of experience and holds a PhD from the University of Chicago. He specializes in React, Next.js, Angular, Apollo GraphQL, RxJS, Redux, and SSR, with deep expertise in performance and scalable architecture. Richard has trained Fortune 5 teams on AI methodology and is authoring a book on programming methods. He learned JavaScript within a year of its creation and has remained at the forefront of tech ever since.
Portfolio
Experience
- JavaScript - 20 years
- Node.js - 6 years
- Angular - 6 years
- TypeScript - 6 years
- React - 6 years
- SCSS - 6 years
- GraphQL - 4 years
- Next.js - 3 years
Preferred Environment
Slack, Tower, WebStorm, Next.js
The most amazing...
...and insane thing I've done is to refactor a 12,000-line function into a properly unit-tested class.
Work Experience
Senior Software Architect
Private Company
- Saved millions in taxes and increased product revenue by 50%.
- Delivered hundreds of millions in future cost savings after architecting the best-performing MVP in company history and designing savings around user friction costs as the solution was adopted across the corporation.
- Selected to Master Builders, a group of the most respected technical thinkers in the company, providing technical guidance and governing to drive enterprise architectural processes.
- Appointed Portfolio Architect for the entire health portfolio, delivering thought leadership for a collection of products impacting company operations and technology direction.
- Engaged to re-architect and strengthen product performance and. Scalability for a multi-million-dollar massive user base.
React and Redux Front-end Developer
fuboTV
- Created a mobile-friendly TV guide.
- Implemented responsive designs in React and Glamor.
- Optimized Redux and RxJS code into reusable components.
- Contributed many React components to a growing library of custom code.
Senior Front-end Developer
HP Enterprise
- Created a versatile account management application for deployment across multiple HP properties.
- Created an Express-based API layer with support for multiple user roles.
- Designed a PostgreSQL database, integrated with Node via Bookshelf and Knex.
- Created an AngularJS front-end application to interact with the API.
- Put all parts in separate docker containers.
- Designed an approach to integrating the account management application into Kibana.
Development Lead (US) and UX Specialist
BetaSmartz
- Created customizable and reusable React/Redux components.
- Implemented test-driven development workflow with Enzyme.
- Streamlined the development process with an Agile workflow—focusing on incremental and reliable success.
- Create wireframes in Balsamiq to clearly and quickly communicate to product owner and development team.
- Led a team to create a more robust product with testing, documentation, and code review cycles.
- Worked closely with the CEO to focus development efforts and priorities.
Architect | Lead Developer
Notate
- Architected a music notation feedback engine.
- Developed responsive music notation web forms.
- Created a web font for music presentations.
Senior Developer
Cengage Learning
- Implemented performance analysis and optimization.
- Developed reusable, high-performance modules.
- Developed an advanced calendar with a hybrid mobile/desktop drag-and-drop.
Mobile Application Architect | Lead Developer
A Fortune 50 Financial Company
- Architected the front end for the company's flagship banking app.
- Implemented a cross-platform, high-use mobile web app.
- Focused on high-performance data loading and animations.
- Created a sophisticated cache mechanism to optimize content delivery.
- Taught the development team how to implement useful units and perform automated testing.
Senior UI Developer
Beche Group, LLC
- Developed a custom implementation of Ext JS drag-and-drop that worked on desktop and mobile.
- Created a high-performance user interface.
Senior Developer
Foreclosure Radar
- Developed a responsive desktop/mobile site.
- Created custom hybrid loading scheme for top performance on different platforms.
- Taught best practices to the development team.
Application Architect | Senior Developer
A Fortune 50 Financial Company
- Developed an iPad application for interacting with large amounts of data.
- Created a high-performance, zoomable grid for displaying thousands of rows of data.
Lead Developer | Application Architect
Warner Bros.
- Led the development on an internal management system using Ext JS.
- Developed dozens of sites with Adobe Flash/ActionScript 3.
Developer
University of Chicago
- Converted storyboards into fully functional websites.
- Developed, from end-to-end, work sites with ColdFusion and SQL Server.
- Implemented PHP performance optimization.
- Created a PHP site from end-to-end.
Experience
Sample Code from a Book I Author
The code is from a chapter of a book I'm writing on computer-assisted music research. The chapter focuses on test-driven development. The single class in the example carries out a set-theoretic operation called "getting the normal form." You can get a quick description of "normal form" at jaytomlin.com/music/settheory/help.html#normalform. Normal form can get a bit challenging when there's not an immediately clear answer, so you can see some recursion at multiple levels. Start with the "getNormalForm" method and work backward.
Even though this code does not show that I know anything about file organization, I can easily discuss my knowledge and screen share more detailed code examples from projects—for which I cannot upload code—demonstrating my expertise.
Education
PhD in Music Theory
University of Chicago - Chicago, IL, USA
Master of Arts Degree in Music Theory
University of Chicago - Chicago, IL, USA
Bachelor of Arts Degree with Honors in Music
Columbia College in the City of New York (Columbia University) - New York, NY (USA)
Skills
Libraries/APIs
Redux-Saga, React Redux, Lodash, JSONP, JSON-RPC, Flexbox, AngularUI, Moment.js, Chai, Underscore.js, React, Node.js, jQuery, jQTouch, NgRx, RxJS, ReactiveX, PhantomJS, NumPy, SciPy, Bookshelf.js, Ramda, D3.js, FlowType.JS, DHTMLX, OpenSSL, Passport.js, CreateJS
Tools
Redux Thunk, Karma, NPM, JSCS, YUI Compressor, Jira, Flash, Chrome Developer Tools, Adobe Photoshop, Grunt, Mocha, Adobe CC, WebStorm, TextMate, Sencha Cmd, Apache HTTP Server, JSX, Gulp, MySQL Workbench, Apache Ant, Balsamiq Mockups, Adobe InDesign, Adobe After Effects, Mongoose, Sencha UI, TanStack Router, Tower, Slack, Site Studio, Emacs, Kibana, CircleCI, Knex.js, Balsamiq, Webpack, NGINX, Xcode, BibTeX, LaTeX, Cinema 4D, Maxon Cinema 4D, 3ds Max, Final Cut Pro, Babel, Adobe Illustrator
Languages
GraphQL, TypeScript 2, TypeScript, CSS3, CSS, XHTML, HTML, HTML5, SCSS, Sass, PHP, ECMAScript (ES6), ES7, JavaScript, Python, Less, Python 3, TeX, PL/pgSQL, Perl, Swift 2, Scala
Frameworks
Next.js, Redux, Angular, JSON Web Tokens (JWT), JsUnit, Prototype Framework, PhoneGap, Jest, Ext JS, Sencha Touch, Jasmine, AngularJS, Rx, Selenium, PixiJS, Express.js, CakePHP, CodeIgniter, .NET, Dredd, Bootstrap, Blueprint, Django, Adobe Flex, Flex, Appium, NestJS
Paradigms
Model View ViewModel (MVVM), Model View Controller (MVC), Unit Testing, Functional Testing, Behavior-driven Development (BDD), Test-driven Development (TDD), Scrum, Agile Software Development, Agile, HIPAA Compliance, UX Design, Rapid Prototyping, App Development
Platforms
iOS, Drupal, WordPress, Android, Drupal 6, Drupal 7, Shopify, Adobe ColdFusion, Oracle, Docker, Drupal 8
Storage
JSON, MySQL, PostgreSQL, NoSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, MongoDB
Other
Rich Internet Applications, Agile Software Testing, Adobe Flash Builder, Cordova, APIs, Intranets, MERN Stack, API Integration, User Experience (UX), Full-stack, User Interface (UI), Shell Scripting, CSS3 Animation, Animation, HTML Email, Scrum Master, Safari Extensions, Vite, Inventory Management, eCommerce, Large Language Models (LLMs), Recommendation Systems, Enzyme, WordPress Plugins, Music, Architecture
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