Thomas is available for hire
Hire ThomasThomas Vo
Verified Expert in Engineering
Software Developer
Location
Plano, TX, United States
Toptal Member Since
June 5, 2019
Possessing both a creative and a logical mind, Thomas is passionate about building practical, well-designed, scalable, and financially sustainable products that impact millions of lives by improving their well-being. As an engineer, Thomas values testable, reusable, performant, secure, and self-documented code. This boils down to the mastery of SOLID principles and design patterns. As a leader, Thomas values wholesome health-conscious cultures, compassionate leadership, and over-communication.
Portfolio
Dormzi
Test-driven Development (TDD), Firebase, SOLID Principles...
Ohana — Singapore and Vietnam
Test-driven Development (TDD), SOLID Principles, Object-oriented Design (OOD)...
KodeQ — Atlanta, GA & Vietnam
SOLID Principles, Object-oriented Design (OOD), WebStorm, AngularJS, JavaScript
Experience
Availability
Part-time
Preferred Environment
JavaScript, WebStorm, React, React Native, MongoDB, Sketch, Figma
The most amazing...
...project I've built is Ohana; where I fundraised and built from scratch both the software and the team, including designers, product managers, QA, and engineers.
Work Experience
Engineering Manager
2019 - 2021
Dormzi
- Managed five engineers, two QA engineers and three Toptal engineers distributed across the world. Interviewed and hired the other two outside of Toptal.
- Took over a codebase with a high amount of technical debt from an outsourced party, rebuilt the team, put agile practices and lean software development culture in place, and worked with QA engineers to stabilize the product.
- Rebuilt the infrastructure of the React Native app to clean up thousands of lines of repetitive code while creating a strong baseline for the future development plan and orchestrated the rest of the team to build new features on top of it.
- Handled the migration of server-side architecture from Express, Firebase Functions, and Firestore to Apollo, Heroku, and MongoDB Atlas to allow for better extensibility, security, and simplified logic.
- Collaborated with a Toptal designer and a Toptal PM to orchestrate the development team to build features on top of an architecture that shares code between React Web and React Native.
- Planned and held product meetings to ensure three-way feedback among product, design, and development for maximum product impact and minimum development effort while also steering each team member toward high ownership of various product parts.
- Maintained the development process and constantly made iterative changes to tailor-fit to the team and the circumstances rather than adhering strictly to existing agile frameworks.
- Built a form generator library from scratch that generates a form based on a simple config object and abstracts out all complex logic like validation, formatting, submitting, loading animation, and more.
- Dived into the code, built a ton of features on both React Web and React Native, and wrote a ton of unit tests with Jest, Testing Library, Enzyme.
- Created a lightweight system that runs WebDriverIO tests on 50 concurrent browser instances on AWS DeviceFarm, which cut E2E testing time from 40 minutes to seven minutes.
Technologies: Test-driven Development (TDD), Firebase, SOLID Principles, Object-oriented Design (OOD), Node.js, WebStorm, JavaScript, Express.js, Cloud Firestore, XState, GraphQL, Apollo, MongoDB, React Native, React, Jest, WebdriverIO
Co-founder | CTO
2017 - 2020
Ohana — Singapore and Vietnam
- Founded and managed the entire product team of the most advanced apartment marketplace in Vietnam (Airbnb-like, for residential rentals) on React and React Native. The platform reached 200,000 users in two years, serving 1,500 finders every day.
- Built the entire marketplace stack, including mobile apps on React Native, APIs on Express.js, and the database with MongoDB.
- Developed an authentication system from scratch to replace Firebase due to its low performance in Asia. Created a concurrency system to sync users' offline data across multiple devices.
- Migrated all of the AngularJS components on the legacy web app to React Native on mobile while rewriting zero lines of code.
- Created a roommate-matching algorithm based on 22 different lifestyle qualities. Built a dynamic form wizard where each step adapts to answers in the previous steps. The wizard engine is decoupled enough to be reused on both React Native and Angular.
- Built several admin features on React, including data charts with Highcharts, CRMs, and user management.
- Developed a simpler alternative to Redux that is highly tailored to the current system.
- Developed financial models, laid out business strategy, raised funding, and participated in strategic investor meetings.
- Built Tableau charts connected to the MongoDB BI portal to perform data analytics, resulting in two times the GMV of the marketplace.
- Designed the UI, UX, and branding of the product with Sketch, and led the product design team.
Technologies: Test-driven Development (TDD), SOLID Principles, Object-oriented Design (OOD), Node.js, WebStorm, JavaScript, Firebase, Sketch, Tableau, Highcharts, AngularJS, CSS, HTML, Express.js, MongoDB, React Native, React, Figma
Co-founder | CEO
2014 - 2016
KodeQ — Atlanta, GA & Vietnam
- Screened and built a JavaScript team in Ho Chi Minh city for Weather.com, based in Atlanta, GA.
- Participated in sales, management, and operations—growing the company to 15 engineers.
- Facilitated remote collaborations for teams on opposite sides of the world.
Technologies: SOLID Principles, Object-oriented Design (OOD), WebStorm, AngularJS, JavaScript
Software Engineer V
2014 - 2015
ADP
- Joined the effort to rebuild the entire web product by transforming a scattered system of web technologies into a centralized system with unified standards and up-to-date technology using a proprietary framework built in-house.
- Used Sketch to create new UI designs for the product.
- Built upon the original framework to provide more tools and a better developer experience.
Technologies: Test-driven Development (TDD), SOLID Principles, Object-oriented Design (OOD), WebStorm, CSS, HTML, JavaScript
Senior JavaScript Developer
2013 - 2014
The Weather Company (An IBM Business) — Atlanta, GA
- Joined the core team that establishes new programming standards for the front end of a newly built content management system on Weather.com.
- Designed and implemented foundational Angular services and directives that are later used by other developers to build testable application modules.
- Transferred knowledge and experiences to several team members who were new to AngularJS.
- Worked with CSS and JavaScript animations to deliver highly interactive web content to visitors.
- Optimized the critical rendering path, bringing page load time from five seconds to two seconds.
- Trained and mentored new team members.
- Performed code review during development cycles to ensure code quality and standards.
- Used a Highcharts library to deliver charting solutions across the weather visualization features.
Technologies: Test-driven Development (TDD), SOLID Principles, Object-oriented Design (OOD), WebStorm, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, Highcharts, Facebook API, Sass, AngularJS
JavaScript Application Developer
2013 - 2013
CafePress — Atlanta, GA
- Joined the effort of upgrading the formerly Flash application to an HTML5/JavaScript application based on the Backbone.js framework that offers compatibility with present and future browser technology.
- Worked with HTML5 Canvas and Fabric to create a straightforward, interaction design tool that allowed customers to customize printable products.
- Implemented a CORS API to communicate with a complex JavaScript application that can be embedded on any website.
- Worked with an iframe to create a fresh runtime environment for the embedded JavaScript application.
Technologies: SOLID Principles, Object-oriented Design (OOD), WebStorm, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, CORS, AngularJS, HTML5 Canvas, RequireJS, Fabric, Backbone.js
Web Application Developer
2012 - 2013
WingStats — Atlanta, GA
- Successfully implemented agile development workflows.
- Built the whole system from the ground up: database design, back-end, and front-end architectural design.
- Migrated the original application from BackPress to the Yii Framework for an improved component organization thus putting more focus onto solid architecture and security.
- Customized the Yii framework to add design patterns that support enterprise-grade software development: dependency injection, aspect-oriented programming, two-step view layout, service layer (transaction script implementation), and JSON web service inspired by the "Patterns of Service-oriented Web Application" by Martin Fowler.
- Completely replaced an outdated jQuery front end with modern Angular and RequireJS.
Technologies: MySQL, SOLID Principles, Object-oriented Design (OOD), JavaScript, CSS, HTML, AngularJS, jQuery, PHP, Yii
Full-stack Magento Developer
2012 - 2013
ExpandLab (Acquired by Visiture) — Atlanta, GA
- Customized and developed from scratch sophisticated Magento extensions spanning the back end to front end for several eCommerce websites built on the Magento framework.
Technologies: MySQL, PHP, SOLID Principles, Object-oriented Design (OOD), CSS, HTML, jQuery, JavaScript, Magento
JavaScript Application Developer
2012 - 2013
Tentail — Atlanta, GA
- Used Backbone.js to build a single-page web application that completely operates on JavaScript/HTML and uses Ajax to communicate with web services on the main server.
Technologies: SOLID Principles, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, Backbone.js
Experience
Sample Angular-auth.js
This project focused on an authentication module for an application targeting South East Asian users. We initially used Firebase for authorization, but then we discovered it was extremely slow to use in South East Asia, so we developed our authorization module. Some external libraries have been removed to make the sample code easier to read.
Sample React-bind DataModel.js
This sample consists of a decorator I developed that serves as an uncomplicated and straightforward Redux and Flux replacement for basic applications. It helps bind multiple models to the View's state as long as the models implement the method "onChange." After binding, a change in the models will trigger a props change followed by a re-render.
Sample React-unsubscribeOnUnmount.js
This project consisted of creating a decorator that injects a function "addUnsubscriber" into a View component's props to handle event unsubscription. The View may call "addUnsubscriber" to pass in a callback that would unsubscribe an event. All the unsubscribe callbacks will be called when the component unmounts.
Geeky Weekend Event Series
Most developer events are organized with a speaker facing an audience. This setup is boring, passive, and lacks interactiveness. Seeing this gap, a passionate group of friends in tech and I founded the Geeky Weekend event series, aiming to provide an interactive environment between the audience and the speakers where they can freely join a multi-way round-table discussion on any topic and help each other improve skills on the fly.
Skills
Languages
JavaScript, SQL, HTML, PHP, GraphQL, CSS, Sass
Frameworks
AngularJS, React Native, Yii, Express.js, Jest
Libraries/APIs
Lodash, Node.js, React, Facebook API, Recompose, Highcharts, Backbone.js, HTML5 Canvas, jQuery, Fabric, RequireJS
Tools
WebStorm, Chrome Developer Tools, Sketch, Tableau, MongoDB Atlas, Figma, WebdriverIO
Paradigms
Object-oriented Design (OOD), Design Patterns, Asynchronous Programming, Test-driven Development (TDD), Kanban, Agile Software Development, Agile, Data-driven Design
Storage
MongoDB, MySQL, Cloud Firestore
Other
SOLID Principles, Freelancing, Lean Startups, Apollo, CORS, XState, Startups, Data-driven Templates, Computer Science, Events
Platforms
Firebase, Magento
Education
2011 - 2012
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science
Georgia Institute of Technology - Atlanta, GA, US
2010 - 2011
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science
Clayton State University - Morrow, GA, USA
Certifications
DECEMBER 2012 - PRESENT
Magento Certified Developer
Magento