Allow Myself to Introduce... Myself
Tags: career, webdev, software
Published: 2021-06-22 14:20:15

### whoami?

My name is Keith, and I've been working on the web for over 20 years. I'm currently a Senior Frontend Engineer but I've held a few different titles and worked in a lot of different tech stacks over that time.

### why?

Just a bit of context about me. If you see me on social media, and want to know more, I'll likely point you here.

### what?

I learned about the web while at college in the 90s. I even was a student employee working on the school's website for one summer. I got my first post-college tech job working for a small tech company in NJ, providing customers with various web services. We helped them buy their domains, designed their sites, setup their email. After getting laid off during the dotcom bubble, I landed at another tech company in NJ working on in-house web apps in a LAMP stack environment. I was architecting MySQL databases, writing perl and bash scripts for cron jobs, modifying apache configs, and oh yeah, getting the PHP backend to play nice with the frontend.

In 2005 I landed in Westchester County, NY working for Ask.com/IAC. Majority of my time was spent working on javascript apps that integrated with IE toolbars (yes, those things, I am sorry). Also had the chance to work on Flash/Actionscript/Flex apps like a virtual world, e-cards, smiley creator. Had some exposure to Java using JSP and JSTL but just enough to get the backend to do what I needed on the frontend.

In 2011 I headed south to New York City, first working for a lifestyle/marketing company on partnership microsites that we churned out on a somewhat weekly basis. My first responsive work, as well as Sass and a lot of CSS experimentation on a LAMP stack backend. That only lasted a year because there was some not so great chaotic and shady things going on there. 

I then landed at iHeartRadio on the digital team. I wasn't working on the streaming web site, but on a platform that hosted about 800+ radio station web sites. This platform got re-architected about 4 or 5 times during my 9 years there. From really old PHP to a custom MVC PHP framework, then we merged the separate mobile and desktop sites into one responsive site which is where my frontend experience really came in handy. Eventually that frontend was migrated to a python app powering the backend. Our frontend was a hodgepodge of jQuery, Bootstrap, and vanilla JS with bootstrap grid and whole mess of plugins. After I pushed for us to upgrade and modernize our tech stack, we re-architected that into a React frontend with typescript and then eventually ditched the python backend for full-stack nodejs.

Since 2017, I've been working in the React/Typescript tech stack. I established myself as the go-to resource for much of the UI work. I worked closely with Product Managers and UX designers to implement their visions.

In June of 2021 I said farewell to iHeart and "Hello" to Squarespace. I'm now primarily working on React, with and without typescript, in a large codebase with an in-house component library. It's a different world, and I'm learning new ways to solve problems and excited to see where this takes me.

### anything else?

I'm a big hockey fan (NJ Devils) and I am quite the geek. I grew up on Saturday morning cartoons, Schoolhouse Rock, Atari, Star Wars, and sci-fi/fantasy of the 80s.

I'm known to spout puns and pop culture references and you might find me bopping to some 80s one-hit wonder or 90s grunge, among others.

I like craft beers and experimenting with my Weber Kettle grill/smoker.

I guess that's good enough for now. Say hello in the comments or on twitter.