me, in a nutshell
If you're looking for a showcase of my skills as a developer, check out ZUUT!
Welcome to my corner of the internet! My name is Luke. I'm a software engineer from the USA, currently living in Hungary.
After getting my Computer Science degree from UCONN in 2016, I spent a couple of years in Chicago working at ThoughtWorks in domains like insurance administration, e-commerce, and cybersecurity. On my teams I tended to steward our test automation, and did my best to serve as a company-wide specialist for TypeScript, node, React, and Redux. I also got the opportunity to write some servers in Go, which was pretty rad. Around this time I also had the opportunity to build the SATURATION Android application for BROCKHAMPTON, a world-famous musical group and one of my personal favorites. In the years it was live, it was installed by over 10,000 users and enjoyed a five-star rating on the Google Play store.
I went on to work on the Cloud Infrastructure team at GrubHub in NYC. Migrating to a custom-built infrastructure platform reminiscent of the systems at Netflix, they needed somebody with system design & architecture chops, paired with the front-end skills to build out their management consoles. I enjoyed working on the Java frameworks & services that were consumed by our application developers to build, test & deploy their applications. I also had the opportunity to build out GUIs for our Site Reliabililty Engineers to expose simple network controls and insights for use in outages and other times of crisis. In my last major project, I completed the research & architecture proposal for a new notifications platform. This was to facilitate notification management across push/SMS/email at Grubhub, and involved architecture designs with a Java backend + TypeScript frontend + Cassandra database. Following a review process of the architecture plans and DB schemas, my design was approved by our org-wide architecture review council, and we began work on it the next week.
In January 2020, I took stock of my 4-year career and decided to take a sabbatical. After wrapping up at Grubhub, I embarked to go backpacking around Europe, blissfully unaware of how the year would unfold! I spent a few months volunteering at a hostel in Hungary until the pandemic happened and the world shut down. Hunkered down in Budapest, I took on shorter term software contracts to pay rent as we waited for our hostel to open back up - an event that unfortunately never came to fruition. Not quite the year I planned for, but I did manage to fall in love with a new city! As we sat inside all year, I took on some shorter term software contracts to pay the rent. Among these was a stint with the Software Freedom Conservancy, for whom I rebuilt the website for Selenium, a popular open source browser automation tool.
A year later, I decided to dive back into software - this time, as a free agent. Since early 2021 I have worked with Nuwave Technologies as their resident front-end expert. NuWave sells some great applications for Nonstop servers, and I've enjoyed managing the design, development and release of their front-end code. I also manage automated deployment pipelines using AWS EC2 + Jenkins, and introduced a comprehensive practice of full-suite testing using Jest and Cypress.io. After educating other engineers at the company about best testing practices and lobbying for a strong automated test culture, I'm confident that these practices will stay prevalent in this organization long after I'm gone.
I also work on ZUUT.co, a computer-aided design tool that assists people in planning out and executing their cannabis grows. This one's a doozy, and is a solid showcase of what I can do. ZUUT features an deeply interactive drag-and-drop design tool with sync, save and share features modeled after Google Docs. Users are assisted by a deep interaction and collision detection engine, which provides immediate feedback on the current state of the user's work. The tool runs entirely in the browser and was built with React, Redux, Next.js, and Firebase - with support from Airtable and Contentful. I am especially proud of the smooth Builder interface, convenient auto-saving/sharing features, and an optimized build/deploy strategy that keeps first paints and JS bundles light, (+ Lighthouse scores high!) despite the rich feature set of the full application.
I currently live in Budapest, and split time between here and the Greater Boston area where I grew up. When I'm not coding, you might find me snowboarding or noodling on my beginner's keyboard or sky-pink telecaster. I am currently open to contract, part time and full time work. If you think we may be a good fit, I'd love to hear from you!