Trevor Farlow

human software craftsmanship

force dark mode

Seasoned frontend specialist; full-stack and devOps generalist.
With a keen eye for visual detail and interaction design,
I build responsive web apps that are
delightful, accessible, observable, and fast.

Values

  • human software
    Build with humility and empathy for the people whose daily lives are affected by your code. The best software is delightful, accessible, and fast. And often, the best solution isn't software at all.
  • founder mentality
    Take pride of ownership in every project. Treat customers as people, not faceless units to be "acquired" and "retained". Bias toward action.
  • people over process
    Team success trumps individual praise, and open communication beats knowledge hoarding. Together, devs, designers, and product experts arrive at creative ends none of them may have reached alone. Assume positive intent in others.
  • craftsmanship
    Take pride of ownership in every project. Simplicity, observability, confident test coverage. Success means shipping working features built out of roughly the right shapes1, not some illusion of perfect code. Keep up with the fast-paced web ecosystem, but stay grounded in fundamentals.

Skills

  • frontend
    I've delivered complex webapps using JavaScript's modern incarnations for the past decade; including TypeScript for five years. From a solid foundation of semantic HTML and CSS to advanced React, ESM, code-splitting, service workers, and more—the web is my platform of choice and the place I shine brightest.
  • backend
    Currently building in Elixir's Phoenix Framework. Comfortable in Node and SQL (Postgres/Oracle/MS SQL Server/MySQL/mongoDB). It's been a minute, but I've worked in Clojure, Java, and PHP, even a dash of Ruby and Perl (talk to me about regular expressions :). Functional or object-oriented, I will come up to speed quickly in your backend.
    I've used all the most common AWS services, including Lambda/Serverless, S3, CloudFront, and more. I have strong opinions, loosely held, around fluent REST API design. I find GraphQL powerful (though overhead-heavy). I'm fascinated by scaled, distributed systems; both the capabilities and challenges.
  • devOps
    Comfortable with AWS, Docker, and Kubernetes. Both professionally and for open source, I have maintained CI/CD pipelines using Github Actions, Jenkins, and CircleCI. I've instrumented Elixir and JavaScript apps with observability solutions like Heap Analytics, Sentry, and Datadog using OpenTelemetry as well as proprietary in-house distributed tracing systems similar to Jaeger.
  • remote work
    After 5 years of remote work, I have a hard-won knowledge of the unique ingredients necessary for communication and collaboration in a distributed team. I have a reputation for transparent status updates, productive asynchronous work, and for fostering community within the team even from a distance.

Work

Senior Software Engineer
Instinct Science2020 - Date.now()

Full-stack React development of veterinary electronic medical records in an early-stage startup. TypeScript and GraphQL against an Elixir backend running on AWS EKS (Kubernetes).

  • Introduced full-stack observability using Datadog via OpenTelemetry while on the Platform team
  • Cut build times in half and client bundle sizes by 25% by migrating frontend to Vite from webpack
  • Optimized CI pipeline to save 60 hours of developer time every month
  • Built a feature flag management frontend to give control to non-developer roles. Simultaneously pitched senior leadership for purchasing an off-the-shelf feature management system (LaunchDarkly) to give us superior tooling and allow our company to focus on its core competencies.
  • Implemented a pattern for number and currency localization to support our international customer base
  • Optimized image content on the app's landing page, reducing load times for our many low-end devices
  • Laid out a design tokens approach for our first internal design system together with our UX designer
Open Source Maintainer
Actual BudgetJan 2021 - Jan 2023

Part of the core maintainer team, handling code reviews and community decisions.

  • Ported retired React Native code to a responsive web app to set the early direction for mobile support.
  • Helped refine initial CI and Docker Hub image pipelines.
  • Upgrade to React Router v6
Software Engineer >> Senior >> Staff Engineer
Rally Software / CA Technologies / BroadcomFeb 2014 - Aug 2020

Frontend-weighted full-stack development in Rally, the $100M+ agile application lifecycle management product (think Jira, only way better), working in an event-driven microservices environment continuously delivered against a backdrop of more legacy frameworks than you can shake a stick at. Extensive test coverage and robust production observability. Helped support legacy Clojure/mongoDB microservices.

Team Contributions
  • Mentor teammates in JavaScript, React, and Redux best practices through code reviews, pair programming, training
  • Advise teammates in best practices for using our internal UI design system
  • Organizer of an internal Front-end Developers Guild where best practices are discussed and org-wide working agreements decided
  • Volunteer “steward” for our front-end repository, tasked with fostering developer productivity and a healthy codebase
Technical Contributions
  • Converted our overhauled app's unit testing suite to Jest with @testing-library (from Jasmine/enzyme), pruning 800 test suites containing 9000 tests down to 130 suites containing the 1500 still-relevant tests
  • Drove a 90% reduction of client-side errors by developing a triage tool using Node/GitHub Issues, boosting product reliability and customer experience.
  • Implemented Bugsnag JavaScript error tracking after 3 years maintaining the above tool
  • Revamped our front-end documentation content and build process to catch up to the current state of our app
  • Eased adoption of a new design system (Mineral UI) by acting as a go-between for dev and UX
Volunteer Frontend Developer
Colorado Citizen Software EngineersSpring 2020

Developed a COVID-19 triage hotline for uninsured Coloradans on a small team using TypeScript and Postgres, Twilio, AWS, and an electronic medical records system.

Data Analyst >> Agile Product Owner >> Software DeveloperClearwater Analytics2007 - 2014
  • Data transformation and queries, managed a team of data analysts, built a REST API with HTTP long-polling

Education

BS Molecular Biology, Computer Science minorBoise State University2003-2007
  • Designed and developed a PHP/MySQL-powered webapp for presentation and analysis of genome data, including database design and webserver and version control (SVN) setup.
  • Performed undergraduate research in organic chemistry.
Computer Science Coursework
  • Database Theory (400)
  • Cryptology I (300)
  • Data Structures and Algorithms
  • Discrete Math
  • Calculus II
  • Intro to Computer Science I & II