Clerk (opens in a new tab) — Sept 2023 – Current

Come back later to see my accomplishments.

Netlify (opens in a new tab) — Feb 2023 – July 2023

Netlify bought Gatsby and I’ve joined its “Frameworks” team. Continued to be a core maintainer of the Gatsby framework (opens in a new tab).

• Contributed to my team’s effort of improving Netlify’s runtimes. This included communicating with framework authors, reverse-engineering code, and collaborating with other Netlify teams.
• Coordinated, authored, and published an extensive tutorial called Creating a Source Plugin for Gatsby (opens in a new tab). It enables developers and enterprise customers to more quickly write Gatsby source plugins, greatly increasing their velocity and ability to adopt Gatsby in their tech stack.
• Aided in development of the adapters feature. It makes it easier to deploy and host Gatsby on any deployment platform. I coordinated the public RFC, wrote the documentation, and contributed major parts to the implementation. As a result, Gatsby customers will be able to deploy their app to more of their favourite platforms.

Gatsby (opens in a new tab) — Jun 2020 – Feb 2023

Saw Gatsby grow from a small team to a medium-sized hyper-growth startup. Continued to be a core maintainer of the Gatsby framework (opens in a new tab).

• Implemented Gatsby’s default file-based router (opens in a new tab). Lowered the barriers to entry for each new user, resulting in increased tutorial completions and monthly active users.
• Authored Gatsby’s hot reloading during development. The new responsive and accessible error overlay enabled users to fix their bugs more quickly.
• Aided in designing the API for Gatsby’s multi-core parallelization (opens in a new tab) efforts. Contributed major parts to the LMDB-based parallel query running feature, resulting in build time reductions of up to 40%.
• Led and mentored a team of two developers to build Gatsby’s trailing slash (opens in a new tab) feature. For this I ran a public RFC process. As a result, marketers were able to more easily set SEO-critical settings when using Gatsby.
• Designed, researched, and implemented complete TypeScript support for Gatsby through multiple projects. During those projects I led a team of two developers and coordinated the efforts across departments. As a result, Gatsby users now get automatic TypeScript generation (opens in a new tab) from their GraphQL queries and can use all configuration files (opens in a new tab) with TypeScript.
• Wrote high-quality documentation & blog posts for Gatsby’s website, including all the work mentioned above.
• Managed the commissioned project of updating Gatsby’s MDX support. This included writing tech specs and regularly checking in with the contractor.
• Led the work on Partial Hydration (opens in a new tab), Gatsby’s feature to serve less JavaScript on each page. This feature is powered by React Server Components (RSC) and with its beta release it was the first major React framework to have support for RSC.
• Mentored colleagues in writing technical content for Gatsby’s documentation, leading to an increased number of PRs that already included appropriate documentation changes for new features.

Gatsby (opens in a new tab) — Dec 2018 – Jun 2020 — Part-Time

Joined Gatsby in its early stages when the company was new and the team small. Started the role as a core maintainer of the Gatsby framework (opens in a new tab).

• Devised processes to handle issues & pull requests with pre-defined templates, leading to more consistent, faster, and better responses to user requests. The user sentiment and activity improved.
• Launched and managed Gatsby’s Discord server, enabling users to help each other. It also enabled the Gatsby team to interact more with its users, resulting in a better understanding of real-world user needs.
• Due to enterprise demands, I built various internationalization (i18n) tooling (opens in a new tab) for Gatsby which also included user research.
• Improved automation on various Gatsby GitHub repositories (e.g. bots triaging issues), freeing up time from developers.

• Languages: JavaScript, TypeScript, Node.js, React, Svelte, Vue, GraphQL, HTML, CSS, Python, Bash, Rust
• Concepts: Web App & Developer Tooling Development, Design Patterns, API Design, Technical Writing, Public Speaking, Community Management, Open Source Maintenance, Bundlers (Webpack, Parcel), AST Parsing, Databases (LMDB, SQL, SQLite, Postgres), Version Control (Git), Testing (Unit, Component, Integration, End-to-End)

• Free & Open Source Gatsby Themes (opens in a new tab): Website templates with over 100k+ downloads
• secco (opens in a new tab): Local package testing made easy
• thanks-contributors (opens in a new tab): CLI to help create changelogs for release notes
• lekoarts.de (opens in a new tab): My portfolio built with Gatsby and vanilla-extract