• Experience:
• Community
• Professional
• Educational

Community Experience

• Public Speaker in eight different countries: 16 conferences, 16 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 atThe White House.
  • Full Speaking History
• Technical Writer on zachleat.com, a Web Development Blog.
  • 224 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
  • 1,556 members and growing, 50+ speakers, 90+ events.
• Open Source
  • Eleventy (☆ 10,462) 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 (☆ 5,490), web-font-loading-recipes (☆ 987), GlyphHanger (☆ 180), BigText (☆ 880), 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

This resume is best viewed online. You're invited to view the source code and it will print nicely (but do you really need to?). Using the h-resume microformat. Generated with updated data on October 15, 2021.