Tyrell Downer, Developer in Cleveland, NY, United States
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Tyrell Downer

Verified Expert  in Engineering

Software Developer

Location
Cleveland, NY, United States
Toptal Member Since
August 23, 2022

Tyrell is a passionate software engineer specializing in building full-stack web applications using React/Next.js on the front end, Django or Node.js on the back end, and hosting in AWS (EC2 or Lambda). He has led many mission-critical development projects to completion, including internal tools, full-stack CRMs with thousands of users, and web portals with tens of thousands of users.

Portfolio

Travelers - Personal Insurance Innovation Group
React, APIs, Node.js, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Express.js, TypeORM...
ProAct Pharmacy Services
Django, Django CMS, Python, Vue, jQuery, Bootstrap, HTML, SCSS, JavaScript, CSS...
ProAct Pharmacy Services
JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Python, Django, Django CMS, Django ORM

Experience

Availability

Full-time

Preferred Environment

React, Node.js, PostgreSQL, TypeScript

The most amazing...

...thing I've developed: an email marketing platform that sends personalized emails on behalf of end users without them having to lift a finger (React/Node.js/TS).

Work Experience

Senior Full-stack Developer

2022 - PRESENT
Travelers - Personal Insurance Innovation Group
  • Led the development efforts on a SaaS that received over 100 sign-ups for the beta on day one.
  • Pushed the project from the concept stage to actual working software in six months.
  • Built custom full-stack features, including a CSV uploader and a drag-and-drop email template builder. Both were MUI themed and provided an incredible user experience.
  • Worked closely with product leads and the UX team to create a jaw-dropping user experience.
  • Tracked and delegated tasks to other developers using Jira.
  • Managed and code-reviewed other developers to ensure standards were maintained and our code was performant and handled edge cases.
  • Mentored and collaborated with other developers to come up with optimal solutions.
  • Configured AWS CodeBuild to automatically deploy our front end whenever a change was made to our main or staging Git branches.
  • Made a significant architecture decision about an external email provider that saved us two months of development.
  • Implemented the ability for our end users to add custom fields to their entities.
Technologies: React, APIs, Node.js, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Express.js, TypeORM, Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, AWS CodeBuild, Amazon Cognito, Amazon Cognito User Pools, TypeScript, Axios

Full-stack Developer

2022 - PRESENT
ProAct Pharmacy Services
  • Architected and developed a company-wide platform for employees to post questions and answers about internal processes in an organized way, resulting in approximately 50 hours per day saved company-wide. The platform was built as a Microsoft Power App.
  • Designed and coded the front end of our COVID-19 test kits order form, resulting in over 1,000 orders.
  • Developed and maintained the front and back end of the web portal with 20,000 monthly users.
  • Built our mobile app in React Native for both IOS and Android from scratch. This project improved our customer experience tremendously and reached 15,000 monthly users.
  • Implemented a custom navigation system in React Native. It allowed us to have more control over the general flow and feel of our app's navigation. This resulted in quicker and smoother 'page' transitions.
  • Integrated our Django back end with our React Native front end, which allowed us to use the same user data from our web portal in our mobile app.
  • Set up user authentication and authorization for our React Native mobile app. A significant part was realizing how to natively store sensitive information (such as auth tokens) on iOS and Android devices.
Technologies: Django, Django CMS, Python, Vue, jQuery, Bootstrap, HTML, SCSS, JavaScript, CSS, APIs, Front-end, Figma, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Microsoft Power Apps, PostgreSQL

Web Developer

2021 - 2022
ProAct Pharmacy Services
  • Developed the entire front end of a specialty pharmacy company from scratch using Jquery, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This feature generated an estimated $335,000 in revenue in the first year.
  • Developed a web-based tool for our clients (businesses) to view all of their members' (employees') eligibility for certain medications. This was done using Django, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
  • Added a multitude of features to our CMS (Django CMS). These features allowed marketing team members to control our website's content without asking a developer. This resulted in many hours of saved time for our developers.
Technologies: JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Python, Django, Django CMS, Django ORM

Front-end Developer

2020 - 2021
Apotheosis Marketing
  • Designed and implemented complex front end solutions for our clients.
  • Improved page load time for many clients by finding better hosting solutions, minimizing static files, and implementing better code.
  • Managed and oversaw a UI developer who worked with me to create incredible front ends for our clients.
Technologies: JavaScript, HTML, CSS, React, Vue, Next.js, Nuxt.js

UI Developer

2019 - 2020
Apotheosis Marketing
  • Designed and developed our company website, bringing in over $200,000 in revenue in year one.
  • Designed and built websites for multiple clients, improving their online presence and brand appearance.
  • Communicated with clients to uncover project requirements; executed the requirements in an agile way.
Technologies: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React

ProAct Help

An internal Vue-based application using Microsoft Power Apps on the back end, hosted in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. I was the sole developer on this project, tasked with building a place to store all our internal processes as a company.

The end user had to be able to find company processes (such as 'how do I check the status of a client's application') in an organized manner. Using Vue and Dynamics Power Apps, I built a highly scalable system that sorted processes by hierarchical categories to accomplish this.

Admins could add categories via Power Apps. They could then add processes to those categories in a GUI using a HTML text input for the process title, an autocomplete dropdown to select a category for the process, and a Ckeditor input for the 'body' of the process.

End users could easily navigate categories in the front end and find the process they were looking for. I also built a search bar into the front end so end users could search a process or category.

If end users could not find a process, they could seamlessly submit a ticket for that process to be added to the admins.

This allowed the project to be continuously improved by its users while requiring minimal developer resources for maintenance.

ProAct Mobile App

This was a project that was originally built as a PWA using Django. It became clear to me when I got to the company this would not be sustainable long term. After communicating with the IT director, I received clearance to rewrite the mobile app in a more maintainable and higher-performing way.

I began my research, and it shortly became clear that React Native was the best framework for us to write our mobile app in.

I got the okay for React Native and began development.

One of the main considerations I had to make was how maintainable this would be in the future by another developer, specifically another developer with the little mobile app experience.

I hedged against this throughout the project in two ways:

1. First, deciding on React Native in the first place, as it's very similar to modern front-end web-based languages.

2. Writing clear, concise code and great documentation.

That way, even though I wrote a lot of custom code, such as the custom navigation system the app has, another developer could still pick it up and be productive quickly.

This project, with some marketing help, brought our mobile app from 300 to 15,000 users per month.

Sftwre

A website for a software development agency. The primary purpose was to develop my full-stack web development skills. The project is fully functional.

A key feature is the schedule meeting feature. It hits an AWS API Gateway endpoint and triggers a lambda function that uses the Zoom API to create a meeting. Then the lambda function uses AWS SES to notify both the end user and the site owner with a link to access it via email.

ProAct Web Portal

https://proactrx.com
A Django-based web portal. I was a full-stack developer on this project and built a lot of the front end and back end along with a dedicated back-end developer. This product allows end users to manage their prescriptions, dependents, and many other features.

I was also responsible for building the public-facing website into the web portal. Using Django CMS along with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, I was able to create a rich experience for end users. Implementing Django CMS also allowed our marketing team to make changes to the website's content without contacting a developer. Overall, this saved a lot of developer time.

Django REST Tools

A project I built to make scaffolding full-stack applications much easier, removing a large amount of boilerplate while still being fully expandable by a developer.

This framework provided a JWT-based user auth system already integrated RESTfully with a Vue front end.

The main feature was a GUI that took advantage of Django's ORM and allowed you to create entities. An entity consisted of a model, serializer, admin config, views, and URL endpoints.

The GUI mainly contained a form with entity names, fields, and parent app inputs. You could select unlimited fields of various types (text, int, boolean, image, file, foreign key, and rich text field): for example, a text field named 'title.'

Upon submitting, an entity would be programmatically written in the Django app you selected. The fields will be attached to your model for you. Then the database is migrated, so the model becomes available immediately. It also wrote query functions to your front end corresponding with the created endpoints.

The code was written for your project and could be expanded easily. The GUI will organize your code based on hierarchical Django apps containing entities.

To initiate the project, you simply ran an npx command.

Languages

Python, HTML, SCSS, JavaScript, CSS, Python 3, GraphQL, TypeScript

Libraries/APIs

Vue, Django ORM, React, Node.js, jQuery, Vue 2

Other

Front-end, Amazon RDS, APIs, Data Structures, Algorithms, Poetry, Axios, Strapi, Amazon API Gateway, PIP, TypeORM, Amazon Cognito User Pools

Frameworks

Django, Bootstrap, Nuxt.js, React Native, Next.js, JSON Web Tokens (JWT), Express.js

Tools

Zoom, Figma, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Microsoft Power Apps, CKEditor, PyCharm, AWS CodeBuild, Amazon Cognito

Platforms

AWS Lambda, Visual Studio Code (VS Code), Django CMS, Amazon EC2, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Storage

PostgreSQL, Amazon S3 (AWS S3)

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