Resume

Kurt Noble, Inc. (KNI)

2021 — Present

As KNI's Engineering Manager, I work closely with our clients and our incredible development, design and project management teams to coordinate development projects and leverage modern technologies to build some of the most well-designed, optimized, accessible and SEO-focused websites on the market.

Some of my responsibilities include:

• Creating cost estimates, scopes and proposals for projects and tech stacks.
• Performing technical research and providing input on technical decisions.
• Implementing code review practices and reviewing others' code.
• Assisting with developer hiring practices.
• Implementing and overseeing programming, workflow and QA processes and best practices.
• Writing documentation for code projects and client workflows.
• Maintaining various code libraries used across the company's sites.
• Optimizing developer and content manager workflows as much as possible.

KNI uses many technologies to build, generate, deploy and maintain websites such as Next.js, React, Node.js, GitHub, CircleCI, Docker, Strapi, Render, Webpack, SWC, ESLint, Stylelint, Sass, Tailwind, Styled Components, Vercel, TypeScript, GSAP, WordPress, AWS, GCP, Hugo, Open Graph, Schema.org, SAML SSO, OneTrust, Airgap.js, Hubspot, Marketo, Salesforce and many more.

As an agile team, KNI also has excellent collaboration practices and makes very strong use of collaboration and project management tools for internal and external communications such as Slack, Asana, Jira, Google Workspace and Zoom.

Throughout my time at KNI, I have been able to work with and have ongoing relationships with amazing clients such as Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Rippling, Bolt, Armada.ai, Nylas, Soda Health, Stardog, Cerity Partners, Acryl Data, MindMed, Washington Spirit, and Toyota AI Ventures.

Trilix Marketing Group

2019 — 2021

As a member of the Trilix Interactive Team, I built fully custom websites and emails for our clients. I used HTML, Sass, JavaScript and PHP on top of the company's proprietary custom CMS for the websites that I built at Trilix as well as Campaign Monitor for creating and sending campaigns and transactional emails. Throughout my time at Trilix, I was able to work with clients such as Amerex Fire, Athene, McWane Corporation, Stine Seed, Youth Homes of Mid-America, International Association for Food Protection, and Iowa Mental Health and Disability Services.

Accurate Development

2018 — 2019

I joined the Accurate Development team to help Accurate and its sister companies improve every aspect of their brand's presence. My time at Accurate included creating and improving company websites, coordinating social and email campaigns and designing various marketing pieces.

Freelance

2017 — 2022

When I was nearing the end of my web development program in college, I started operating as a freelance web developer and web marketing consultant have worked closely with many individuals, companies and non-profit organizations to develop websites and coordinate web marketing campaigns over the years.

JavaScript / TypeScript

I make strong use of JavaScript because it is an extremely flexible language that will only continue to grow over time and it can be used for everything from client-side scripting to frontend frameworks and libraries to backend servers. Unfortunately, at its core, JavaScript's dynamic typing and lack of a build system opens up a lot of potential bugs and reliability issues which is why static typing and error checking easily make TypeScript the logical choice for creating any type of scalable JavaScript application.

React / Next.js

My frontend stack of choice is the Next.js framework. By leveraging the power of React with Next, all of the advantages of React's component-driven model, reusability, state management, JSX syntax and simplicity are met with a static, server-rendered or hybrid site generator where you can bring your own styling system, easily set up internationalized routing and data, build an API, control the application using rewrites, redirects, headers and middleware and have full control over how data caches and regenerates, resulting in a heavy and robust web application that compiles down into an ultra-fast and shockingly simple frontend code base.

Node.js

My backend JavaScript tool of choice is Node. Node has allowed me to create backend JavaScript applications as well as APIs that seamlessly work with the frontend of my websites. I'm aware of some modern tooling that has recently been released like Bun that could eventually succeed Node due to its performance, but I've chosen to stick with Node for now while Bun is still young and gaining market share and adoption by cloud providers.

Cloud Services / DevOps

I'm familiar with and make regular use of various cloud service platforms such as AWS, GCP, Render, Vercel, Cloudinary, Cloudflare, CircleCI, GitHub Actions, Pantheon and WPEngine. I typically choose cloud providers based on my client's preferences (if they need services to be spun up in the same environment as their other applications), the complexity of the project, project budget, ongoing maintenance needs, variety of services, maturity of the platform, scalability and security features. The types of services that I'm most familiar with are computing, static storage, databases, CI/CD pipelines, DNS and SSL management, full-stack monolithic app systems, serverless functions, CDNs and monitoring.

Build Systems / Testing

One of the first things that I typically do when setting up a new site or boilerplate is implement custom build configurations and various testing and linting tools to ensure that error-free code is compiling correctly for both development and production environments. The most common build tools that I use are Webpack (I've had my eye on its successor, Turbopack as well), SWC and Gulp and I typically use tools such as ESLint, Stylelint, Lint-staged and Jest to improve the developer experience and produce error-free code before builds run.

APIs / SDKs

I have worked with and built a variety of REST, GraphQL, Groq, GraphQuery and hybrid APIs throughout my time as a developer. The APIs that I have built and extended personally have been used to send data from website interactions and logs to and from databases, transfer data between CMS, monitor for changes to data during content migration and re-platforming and extend the functionality of CMS APIs. I've also used third-party APIs and SDKs such as Google Maps, Vercel, Hubspot, Greenhouse, Rippling, Gmail, Salesforce, Schwab Trader, TD Ameritrade, Lever, reCAPTCHA, Instagram, Cloudinary, Facebook, Shopify, Stripe, PayPal, TikTok, Campaign Monitor, MailChimp and Squarespace. I'm also familiar with common API authentication workflows such as OAuth 2.0.

CSS

All good CSS starts with well-written HTML. By using proper HTML elements and well-written CSS along with tools and techniques such as PostCSS, Tailwind, Styled Components, Materialize, Styled JSX, Sass, Caniuse, Browserstack and CSS build systems I can keep the CSS in my websites clean, light, scoped, modular and cross-browser compatible.

Databases

I work with relational and non-relational databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL and MongoDB. My experience with databases has been for things like pushing and pulling form submissions, managing data for content management systems and uploads for admin-managed info such as image metadata or text data. I'm also familiar with using connection poolers like PgBouncer to improve database scalability and performance.

Optimization / Accessibility

My HTML is written properly and semantically to provide good accessibility, make content user and browser-friendly and make websites easy to maintain and scale. I'm familiar with using various tools and techniques to optimize websites for accessibility such as using ARIA attributes, labels and alternative text to describe elements and interactions, WAVE, Level Access, Google Lighthouse and Axe and am also familiar with large web optimization projects that involve adjusting build system asset splitting, adjusting frontend techniques for suspense, dynamic loading and unloading, implementing tree shaking and purging, identifying large and unused code and properly sizing and formatting various asset types for different screen sizes.

SEO

Using clean and semantic HTML, Open Graph and other meta tags, Schema.org markup, site optimization techniques and services such as Google Search Console, Analytics and Lighthouse, Semrush and Screaming Frog, I build websites with SEO as a primary focus and resolve SEO issues that allow sites to consistently gain traffic from search engines and beat their competitors in search rankings.

Project Management

As an engineering manager, some of my responsibilities include supporting developers, stakeholders, project managers and other team members by coordinating, assigning, scoping and estimating the timing and cost of projects and tasks as well as creating comparisons and cost estimates of things such as cloud infrastructure or other third-party services. For me, this type of work ranges everywhere from small and quick changes from requests that come in over Slack to large-scale projects that span multiple quarters such as building, re-platforming and re-branding sites. The tools that I'm using regularly to perform this type of work are Slack, Asana, Jira, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Zoom and Notion.

Mockup / Prototyping Tools

A large amount of the frontend website work that I do involves translating designs to code. My frequent tool of choice and the most common one that I interact with is Figma, although I have spent plenty of time with other tools such as Adobe XD and Sketch.

PHP / WordPress

I've built a variety of PHP applications over the years, including a task management system, content management systems and custom WordPress and WooCommerce themes and applications that have been deployed on platforms such as WordPress VIP and WPEngine. I also have experience with large WordPress and MySQL database repairs, many of which were solved using PHP and SQL scripting.

Web Development, AAS

Des Moines Area Community College

My time at DMACC included learning new languages and technologies, building proof-of-concept applications and practicing concepts such as test-driven development, pair programming and web project management.

Waukee High School

Waukee, IA — Graduated May 2015