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Bright and Early

The personal site of Steven Bennett

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The Difference is A Passion for Excellence

When you work with someone who is passionate about what they do, it shows in the quality of their work.


Hi, my name is Steven. I'm a software engineer with over 20 years of experience building software for a wide variety of industries. I've worked with companies of all sizes, from startups to Fortune 500 companies. I'm passionate about building high quality software that is a joy to use.
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Skills and Proficiencies

I strive to be a well-rounded engineer, and I'm constantly learning new skills and technologies. Here are some of the skills I've acquired over the years.

Agile

Certified Scrummaster with deep understanding of how to maximize the value of Agile processes for both business/product stakeholders and engineering teams. Skilled in the ability to run efficient, yet effective sprint ceremonies. Understanding of the relationship between well-oiled Agile workflows and the ability of engineering teams to continuously deliver product iterations.
Jira
Linear
Certified ScrumMaster via ScrumAlliance

DX / Tooling

ESLint/Stylelint/Prettier, JSDoc/TSDoc, Docker/VS COde Dev Containers.
ESLint
Stylelint
Prettier

Javascript / Typescript / Node.js

Deep understanding of both current and historical context, ecosystems, constraints/challenges, tooling, and landscape. Understand differences between ESM/CJS/UMD, and interoperability between the different formats. Experience with writing Node libraries/packages and best practices for targeting and bundling for specific platforms (Node.js vs browser vs universal) for optimizing consumability. Highly knowledgeable in exception handling and remediation. Well versed in principles like SOLID, functional programming, and composability; and knowledgeable in other common design patterns and abstractions.
Vanilla Javascript
Node.js
TypeScript
NPM
FP

Frontend / Web Applications

Expert in HTML/CSS/ReactJS, highly proficient with Next.js 13, Vite.js, styled-components, and Tailwind CSS. Extensive experience with both designing and developing clean, elegant, responsive, and accessible user interfaces; including translating designs from tools like Figma into pixel-perfect, functional frontends. Experience using libraries like Apollo Client, tRPC and react-query to reliably and performantly make typesafe queries to backend services for data.
Apollo Client
Next.js
Vite.js
ReactJS
Tailwind CSS
React Query
Redux / RTK
Styled Components
tRPC
Attended Ryan Florence's React Workshop

Backend / APIs / Web Services

Strong knowledge of best practices techniques/patterns/tooling for writing backend/API services; Creating and configurating secure HTTP servers via native Node.js APIs, or with libraries like Express.js or HAPI. Input/output validation v ia libraries like Zod. Database ORMs like Sequelize, DrizzleORM, TypeORM, or Prisma.js. Implementing Web Socket servers via Socket.io. Creation and management of worker queues.
Express
Socket.io
Zod
TypeORM
Drizzle ORM
Prisma
GraphQL
Figma
Completed SalesForce Developer Training

Code Quality / Testing

Jest/Vitest and react-testing-library for unit testing React components, have experience with other test runner/assertion/utility libraries like Chai, Jasmine, Ava, and Enzyme. Have used Cypress, Nightwatch, and Playwright for writing E2E tests.
Jest
Vitest
Playwright
Completed Kent C. Dodds' JavaScript Testing Workshop

DevOps

Highly knowledgeable in creation of optimized CI/CD pipelines using platforms like GitHub Actions, Jenkins, CircleCI, and others. Extensive experience with container orechestration tools Docker/Docker Composer, and Kubernetes.
Docker
CircleCI
Jenkins
GitHub Actions
Kubernetes
Terraform

Cloud Infrastructure

Extensive experience with AWS, have also used GCP and Azure Cloud. Have utilized a variety of infrastructure-as-code tools such as CloudFormation, AWS CDK, and Terraform for defining and provisioning cloud resources. Have utilized numerous AWS services, including CloudFormation, Cognito, ECS (Fargate), Lambda, SQS, SNS, RDS, S3, and AppSync among others.
Amazon Web Services
Google Cloud
Vercel

Other

Proficient in Linux/Unix-based operating systems, Python, shell scripting, automating processes and tasks. Utilizing AI tools to increase productivity.
Linux
Bash
Python
PHP
ChatGPT
GitHub Copilot
CompTIA A+ Certified

Professional Work Experience

GE Vernova logo

General Electric

Senior React Developer

June 2024 - Present

  • Responsible for building accessible, responsive, and easily maintained UI components and pages for a SaaS Web application used by power grid operators to view real-time data and run simulations against the power grid.
  • Utilized a modern tech stack, including Node.js, Vite, TypeScript, React, TailwindCSS, while following Web application development best practices and principles, such as component composition and SOLID, to build a performant, scalable and elegant frontend application.
  • Wrote detailed and effective component unit tests using Vitest, React Testing Library, and jsdom, and functional tests using Playwright.
  • Facilitated design validation and developer adoption through comprehensive Storybook documentation.
  • Used knowledge of the various cloud providers, such as Azure, Google Cloud, and AWS, to architect a cloud provider agnostic pipeline for deployment of the Web application infrastructure in the customer’s own cloud environment.

US Treasury Department logo

US Treasury Department

Lead Engineer

December 2023 – June 2024

  • Led team of three developers in efforts to create a unified platform in which cloud resources could easily be provisioned via a Web frontend from AWS, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud.
  • Oversaw scrum ceremonies such as daily standups, backlog refinement, sprint planning and sprint review, as well as collecting metrics to measure team success against project goals and timelines.
  • Worked with stakeholders to gather and document requirements, create tickets in Jira, and prioritize the backlog.
  • Utilized knowledge of frontend development best practices to help mentor junior developers in best-practices regarding HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and React to create a performant, and easy to use Web application.
  • Used experience and knowledge to improve application accessibility, automate repetitive tasks, add quality-of-life improvements for developers such as ESLint/Prettier, and improve code quality through TypeScript and testing tools such as unit testing via Vitest and automated functional testing with Playwright.

HMH CO logo

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Senior Engineer

June 2023 – December 2023

  • Tasked with the migration and unification of the legacy “School/Class/Student Profile” report applications to a single Next.js 13 application.
  • Migrated and refactored existing code following best practices and patterns including SOLID principles, to create highly composable, single-focus components with context providers/consumers, and hooks.
  • Gained valuable experience implementing the core features and functionality of Next.js 13 and led initiatives to implement new patterns such as the App Router, Server Components, and Server Actions.
  • Utilized broad experience in application/service release pipeline automation to solve issues with long build/release times using various methods like optimization of layers in Docker container definitions, utilizing dependency store caches, the caching of both task orchestration artifacts and their inputs to prevent running pipeline jobs needlessly, and CI job caching in BitBucket.

Jaguar Land Rover logo

Jaguar Land Rover

Senior Engineer

November 2022 – June 2023

  • Sole engineer embedded in the Design/UX Research organization responsible for building a Web application that enables designers and UI/UX researchers to embed prototypes created in various tools such as Proto.io and Figma, and capture user interactions for analysis.
  • Designed and built a highly scalable, full stack Web application, along with accompanying backend services, using VS Code Dev Containers for consistent development environments, PNPM for mono- repository workspace tooling, Turborepo for task orchestration, Docker Compose for local development, Vite/React/Tailwind on the frontend, and Express/Prisma/GraphQL on the backend.
  • Utilized deep understanding of foundational Web technologies such as the HTTP protocol, iframes, cookies and nginx reverse proxies, to extend the functionality of the prototyping tools and implement a novel solution that went far and beyond the expectations of the product team.
  • Automated the previously manual process of importing, processing, and uploading of prototypes, which eliminated the need for two roles, allowing those team members to focus on more valuable work.

NBA logo

NBA

Senior Engineer

April 2022 – October 2022

  • Worked as backend engineer on the Data API platform team, responsible for the maintenance and development of the Core Data APIs and serviced used for live in-game data and player stats on NBA.com and televised broadcasts.
  • Implemented a new GraphQL API service to replace an existing REST API service, which reduced the number of requests required to retrieve data, and improved the performance of the API by up to 80%.
  • Leveraged TypeScript and GraphQL to create a type-safe API client library that was used by the frontend team to consume the API.
  • Assisted in creation and launch of NBA League Pass, including the development of services used to stream live game video and statistics.

Nike logo

Nike

Senior Engineer

September 2021 – April 2022

  • Acted as the sole engineer on team in the innovation organization, responsible for the creation of a Web application used by product teams at Nike to understand and quickly find information about the organizational structure and taxonomy of any team in the company.
  • Designed, documented, and built a highly scalable, performant Web application and supporting services using a Node.js, Typescript, Vite.js, React, and GraphQL application stack running on an AWS ECS (Fargate)/ECR, AppSync infrastructure defined in and managed by CloudFormation templates.
  • Used React and styled-components along with optimized CSS animations to build an elegant and user-friendly frontend application that followed and adhered to usability and accessibility best practices.
  • implemented a mono-repository via PNPM workspaces and Turborepo, along with the latest tools and libraries to enable an easy to setup and use development environment and automated CI pipelines to support rapid feature releases.

Nike logo

Nike

Senior Engineer III

August 2019 – September 2021

  • Frontend engineer using Typescript and React.js to build Machine Learning-driven chat application on the Twilio platform used by the “Nike Experts on Demand” team to support and engage high-value customers.
  • Leveraged "CSS-in-JS" libraries such as styled-components to construct responsive, pixel-perfect UI components from Figma designs provided by the design team. Used extensive knowledge of CSS to achieve smooth, high-quality UX and animations.
  • Worked closely with backend and mobile teams to design solutions, define contracts, and prioritize sprint work.
  • Authored unit tests using Mocha/Chai, component rendering assertions using Jest and react-testing-library, and functional tests with Cypress.
  • Maintained highly-effective relationships with the Product Owner and larger business organization to refine and prioritize stories in the product backlog, resolve design anomalies or external dependencies, and validate business hypotheses via A/B experiments.

Nike logo

Nike

Lead Engineer

May 2016 – August 2019

  • Led a team of three engineers on a project to redesign and migrate the Nike customer support sites off the Oracle CX Customer Portal platform to a single AWS cloud-hosted Web application written in React.js.
  • Collaborated closely with the Product Owner to create and refine stories in the product backlog, ensured tech debt was captured and prioritized, managed inter-team dependencies, and mentored junior engineers.
  • Tasked with migrating 48 separate code bases written in PHP, with no source control, or unit testing, and changes had to be manually uploaded to the Web server via WebDAV; to a Node.js project with source control, and Jenkins CI/CD pipelines that ran had stages for running tests, bundling code and deployment to AWS ECS Fargate services.
  • Successfully converted and unified Get Help sites into a single Git repository with 70% code coverage, localization, and internationalization built-in, and deployment pipelines that saved hundreds of developer hours.

Oracle logo

Oracle

Site Architect

April 2011 – May 2016

  • Built consumer-facing customer service and support sites using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP/CodeIgniter on the Oracle RightNow CX platform, to demonstrate the product’s features and functionality to prospective customers.
  • I worked in the sales organization, building product sales demo sites according to requirements provided by Solution Consultants.