About

Professional Work

CarGurus

2022 - Present – Sr. Frontend Engineer

• Contributed to building and launching a new product within CarGurus.
• Mentored engineers in React best practices, design patterns, stability, and performance.
• Contributed to iterative development and improvement of products across teams.
• Iterated on existing 'digital deal' product using MVTs & A|B testing; helped increase leads.

Harvard Medical School / Biomedical Informatics

2020 - 2022 – Lead Front-End Developer  |  2019 - 2020 – Sr. Front-End/Full-Stack Developer

• Leading front-end development on two projects with 4+ front-end developers, within multidisciplinary team of 20+.
  • Clinical Genomics Analysis Platform ('CGAP') (see portfolio) - A portal to aid clinicians in diagnosing and addressing genetic disorders. Used by multiple major hospitals in Greater Boston.
  • 4D Nucleome Data Portal (data.4dnucleome.org) (see portfolio) - A successor to the human genome project; used by thousands of DNA researchers around the world.
• Implemented Pedigree (Family Tree) visualization tool, incl. algorithms for finding optimal node ordering, positioning, and visually-appealing edge routing. Built as React components which leverage memoization to ultimately render SVG & HTML DOM elements.
• Mentoring, on-boarding, and hiring front-end developers.
• Drafting UI-related architectures, plans, and tasks in response to business requirements.
• Aiding external teams in building & packaging visualization tools/components, integrating into CGAP & 4DN platforms.
• Helped initiate weekly happy hour events and promote team cohesion.

2016 - 2019 – Front-End Developer

• Led front-end development on the 4D Data Nucleome Portal, which runs a single-page application.
• Created and iterated on variety of views and overall front-end design in React.js.
• Worked with PostgreSQL as a master canonical database and ElasticSearch for searching and as a fast-read cache.
• Utilized ElasticSearch to aggregate large quantities of portal metadata to then visualize with React.js and D3.
• Created a divide-and-conquer tracing algorithm to recursively trace a provenance graph of files and the workflow runs which generated them.
• Visualized file provenance graphs and workflow pipelines -- defined using CWLs -- on the front-end with React and selected D3 functions (see portfolio).
• Setup Google Analytics to inform UX design and JSON-LD structured data for Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
• Fully open-source and available at github.com/4dn-dcic/fourfront.

IntelAgent (Startup)

2016 Part-Time – Full-Stack Developer

• Led UI and backend development on a cross-platform application in React Native to connect real estate agents with purchasers.
• Developed a web front-end in React.js as first step and prototype for mobile application design (see portfolio).
• Iterated on mobile app design with feedback from shareholders.
• Developed basic API using Python3 and MongoDB NoSQL DB.
• Utilized WebSockets with pub-sub for real-time agent-buyer chatting, using a Python3 Tornado server.

Integrated Computer Solutions, Inc.

2011 - 2016 – Full Stack Web Developer  |  2011 - 2014 – UX, UI, & Graphic Designer

• Designed, planned, developed, and extended functionality & user experience of various web applications and sites, including ones based on or integrating with CMSs such as Drupal and Bolt.
• Served in all roles (differing per project) of designing, prototyping, implementing, iterating, and testing user experiences & interfaces for web, mobile, tablet, and desktop applications, including those geared for Windows (with .NET/XAML) and those meant to be portable across platforms (with Qt & QML framework).
• Contribution to design & development of company websites including viewpointkiosks.com, aspects of ics.com, and Qt DevDays 2014 & 2015 Roadshow @ qtdeveloperdays.com (see portfolio).
• In the course of work or on own time, effectively learned, applied, and/or presented front-end & back-end technologies to own and other teams including Canvas, WebGL (+ Three.JS and other frameworks), interactive SVGs, RESTful AJAX, RequestAnimationFrame, Redis, Bolt CMS, analytics tracking methods, etc.
• Helped plan and implement agile iterative design-process-based workflows for effectively meeting project goals and requirements while avoiding common pitfalls such as changing project requirements.
• Helped research and analyse different strategies, technologies, and software to advise managers, other developers, and designers in finding better options or solutions in context of available skills and resources.
• Iterated through interface design, style, components, and graphic elements for embedded, mobile, and web applications.
• Iterated on own and others' code for performance, maintainability, and reusability; documented code.

Joule Unlimited

Summer 2010 – Contractor

• Drafted, modeled, rendered, and composited scenes of proposed bio-fuel solar facilities for marketing visualization; learning and applying open-source software such as BRL-CAD, Blender, Inkscape, and GIMP.

Skills & Experience

JavaScript (JS)

• 11+ years experience writing production front-end JS (ES3, ES5, ES2015, ...).
• 8+ years experience building front-ends/apps with React.js, plus 3 months w/ React Native.
• 5+ years experience with NodeJS, including server-side-rendering (SSR) using classic approaches.
• ~1 year experience with NextJS for SSR and static site generation (SSG).
• Building & extending professional, personal, & acadamic JS-based or JS-heavy web sites and applications.
• Building, publishing, & reusing portable libraries and components in course of work.
• Experience with libraries & frameworks including Babel, Webpack, React, Interactive SVGs & HTML5 Canvas, D3.js, Backbone.js, lodash/Underscore, TypeScript, Babylon.js and three.js (WebGL), (efficient) jQuery, Google Maps JS API, Leaflets, and others.

Web design & development with HTML5 (HTML + CSS3 + JS)

• 15+ years exp. designing, developing, and administering web sites & applications, inclusive of personal & academic projects.
• Usage of responsive front-end frameworks such as Zurb's Foundation and Bootstrap.
• 6+ years exp. of SCSS.
• Using and extending static site generation frameworks such as NextJS (Node.js), Twig (PHP), and Jinja2 (Python).
• Deep understanding of the Document Object Model (DOM) & CSS3.

OOP & FP back-end development with Python, Java Spring, PHP, C# (+ .NET, & XAML)

• 5+ years exp. with Python, including web frameworks such as Pyramid, Flask, & Bottle to create horizontally-scalable hybrid & single-page web applications and RESTful APIs (for usage with mobile applications); Tornado for WebSockets.
• 5 years experience with PHP, including frameworks such as Symfony2, Silex, & DBALs such as Doctrine.
• Building custom content-management systems (CMSs) & web applications; extending CMSs (Drupal, Bolt) through module development - both own/custom and contribution to open source projects.
• 2+ years exp. with C# (incl. Windows Store Apps)
• ~1 year exp with Java & Java Spring

Designing & programming for scalability, performance, and long-term maintainability.

• Leveraging PaaS & IaaS solutions ('cloud computing') for scaling application instances and storage including Red Hat's OpenShift, Amazon Web Services (EC2, S3, EB, RDS), MongoLab, RedisLabs, and BackBlaze B2.
• Publish-subscribe using Redis for server-server communication; WebSockets for server-client notifications.

Data modeling with NoSQL & relational databases

• MySQL (+ MariaDB, SQLite, PostgreSQL; SQL language), MongoDB, Redis, filesystem + text files (e.g. CSVs), and client storage (cookies, localStorage).
• Experience with ElasticSearch, including writing aggregation requests for large datasets and transforming responses for front-end visualization and creating API endpoint(s) for searching.

Visual Design, CAD, and 3D Modelling

• 6+ years experience with graphic design software including Adobe Photoshop, Inkscape, GIMP, Illustrator.
• 1-5 years experience in After Effects, Flash; modelling & rendering with Rhino, Blender, AutoCAD, 3ds Max, & Revit.

Education

Boston Architectural College

Bachelor of Design Studies in Digital Design & Visualization, May 2015.

• Awards: Degree Project Commendation and Distinction in Practice.
• Thesis Project: "Building a Citizen-Centric E-Participation Platform," github:alexkb0009/issues-platform; ask for book.

Harvard University Extension School and Boston University Metropolitan College (B.U.)

Spring 2013 - Spring 2014

• Computer Science courses (incl. EconCS & Windows Application Development)

B.U. and Boston College's Woods College of Advancing Studies

Fall 2013 - Fall 2014

• Courses in Organizational Behavior & Development and Financial Reporting Analysis

Boston Latin School & Brookline High School

• 800/600/650 Math/Reading/Writing SAT Scores (2008)