• Experience:
• Community
• Professional
• Educational

Community Experience

• Public Speaker in eight different countries: 16 conferences, 17 meetups, seven barcamps, 12 podcasts, and one University guest lecture.
  • Events like JAMstack_conf, Beyond Tellerrand, Smashing Conference (×3), CSSConf, and the first ever Tech Meetup at The White House.
  • Full Speaking History
• Technical Writer on zachleat.com, a Web Development Blog.
  • 250 posts since February 2007, 61 entries on Web Fonts. On my writing,
    • Sarah Drasner said she “shaved full seconds off this big application […] by following some of Zach’s great materials […]”
    • Jeremy Keith twice said “Always ask yourself What Would Zach Do?”
    • Paul Irish called me “damn smart”—a debatable claim, to be sure.
  • 2,658,000 lifetime page views and growing.
  • Popular Blog Posts
• Conference Organizer and Co-founder of NEJS CONF.
  • 2015 to 2019
  • Five conferences, 46 speakers, about 200 attendees per year.
• Lead Organizer for NebraskaJS, a JavaScript meetup.
  • July 2012 to March 2018
  • 1,547 members and growing, 50+ speakers, 90+ events.
• Open Source
  • Eleventy (☆ 0) Open Source Author. A simpler static site generator. Used in production by Google (v8.dev, web.dev, and Chrome’s dev summit), CERN, CSS-Tricks, A Book Apart, Filament Group, Netlify, Khan Academy, and more.
    • Two-time winner of the Google Open Source Peer Bonus Award for Eleventy in 2018 and 2019.
    • Addy Osmani called it “absolutely wonderful.”
    • Chris Coyier said it was “almost fascinatingly simple.”
    • Read more Eleventy testimonials from Mathias Bynens, Paul Lewis, Mina Markham, Tatiana Mac, and others.
  • Other projects include Tablesaw (☆ 0), web-font-loading-recipes (☆ 0), GlyphHanger (☆ 0), BigText (☆ 0), and others.
  • Contributions to Bootstrap, Modernizr, Respond.js, loadCSS, caniuse, jQuery Mobile, MediaElement.js, html5please, a11yproject, and CSS Lint, and others.
• Community
  • Implemented Font Loading strategies for CSS Tricks and Smashing Magazine.
  • Managing five Web Development Twitter accounts:
    • zachleat
    • eleven_ty
    • nebraskajs
    • nejsconf
    • fontspeed

Professional Experience

• Web Developer for Netlify
  Remote to San Francisco, CA
  • January 2020 to Present
• Web Developer for Filament Group
  Remote to Boston, MA
  • June 2012 to January 2020
  • Web development and consulting focused on a web for everyone: Performance, Responsive Design, Accessibility, and more. Personal specialties included web fonts, accessible forms, and responsive tables.
  • Voted Agency of the Year, .net Awards 2015
  • Worked with clients like LEGO, Akamai, Global News, rent.com, salary.com, ebay, CNN, Forrester Research, attivio, Objective Logistics, RetailMeNot, Liberty Mutual, and more.
  • Converted type character designs into a multi-layer multi-typeface web font implementation for previewing monograms on retail clothing.
  • Standardized the new project boilerplate and the release process for project maintenance.
  • Wrote a lightweight no-dependency IE8-compatible polyfill for custom events.
  • Developed a responsive reusable component library for email.
• Front End Architect for Union Pacific Railroad
  Omaha, NE
  • June 2011 to May 2012
  • While maintaining a technical leadership role for the component library, also responsible for setting the company's direction for mobile application development.
  • Developed a input-device independent reusable component library to serve both mobile web and hybrid native applications.
  • Ownership of all company authentication pages, internal/external and mobile/desktop. Used progressive enhancement to expand device support.
  • Evangelize front end development best practices including cross-browser compatible code, progressive enhancement, automated testing, and Responsive Web Design.
  • Started an internal HTML5 and Open Web User Group to educate developers on new web platform features.
• Project Lead for Union Pacific Railroad
  Omaha, NE
  • July 2008 to May 2011
  • Lead developer and support team for company-standard User Interface library used on all new web projects.
  • 62 separate reusable components across 5 simultaneous major code branches and over 50 versions.
  • Sole individual provider of support to a large developer base (~1500 employees and contractors in IT) which yielded an average of over 400 support tickets per year. Reduced total yearly defect support tickets by 43%.
  • Migrated existing code base to comply with new i18n requirements without incurring a runtime performance cost.
  • Adapted to marketing department's company wide brand refresh, centrally and easily applied to all applications.
  • Improved performance by reducing component initialization times between major versions by 5.2× in IE7 with the addition of prerendered markup in a Java framework.
  • Prevented an Adobe Flexpocalypse by opposing adoption of Adobe Flex as the primary UI development tool using the merits of the Open Web.
• Front End Engineer for Union Pacific Railroad
  Omaha, NE
  • June 2006 to July 2008
  • User Interface development for three internal projects, one of which received approximately 15 million hits per month.
  • Developed build process for automated deployment including CSS and JS minimization, with linting (JSLint), integration testing (Selenium) and unit testing (JSUnit).

Educational Experience

• Computer Engineering at University of Nebraska
  Lincoln, NE
  • August 2001 to May 2006
  • BS in Computer Engineering, Minor in Mathematics
  • Course Work in Semantic Web, Computer Architecture, Data Structures and Algorithms, Database Systems, Artificial Intelligence, Cryptography and Security, GUI and Unix Programming, Operating Systems and Kernels
• Engineering Study Abroad Program
  Fortaleza, CE, Brazil
  • May 2005
  • Studies in Brazilian Culture and the Portuguese Language

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