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alex_jeffcott_cv.md

Alex Jeffcott: Senior Frontend Developer

Berlin, Germany
alexjeffcott@gmail.com
linkedin.com/in/alexanderjeffcott

Summary

As a frontend developer with a special interest in automating quality assurance, web APIs and integrations (sdks and Chrome extensions), I have spent the last 6 years or so working with the wide variety of colleagues and techs needed to take a web application from local development to production.

Some details

What do you normally work on?

Delivering value directly through Growth experiments or indirectly through innovation initiatives and engineering enablement

  • quick experiments to test against key growth metrics (mostly acquisition and engagement) at key stages in the user funnel such as optimising flows from marketing pages to sign up to using features that represent the key value propositions in the core application.
  • solid experiences that must be intuitive, snappy and robust (sign up, login auth pages)
  • innovative products that expand how users interact and experience a platform (Chrome extensions)
  • halving the time to deploy the frontend by optimising Jenkins pipelines
  • eliminating manual QA bottlenecks by building and championing automated testing infrustrature and culture.
  • mentoring less experienced colleagues
What do you normally work with?

Here are the techs that I have been working with on a daily basis

  • frontend ‘frameworks’
    • React
    • Preact
    • NextJS
    • React-static
    • web-components (without frameworks such as Stencil)
  • JS build techs
    • Webpack and Babel
    • esBuild
    • Rollup
    • Vite
  • quality automation techs
    • Typescript
    • Jest
    • Mocha
    • MSW
    • Pact
    • Cypress
    • testing-library
    • eslint
    • Istanbul
    • c8
  • ci/cd
    • Github Actions
    • Jenkins with Docker (Google Container Registry and Github Registry)
    • Netlify
  • AB experiment tooling
    • Optimizely
    • Bunchbox
  • monitoring, tracking and observability
    • Datadog
    • Segment
    • Sentry
Who do you normally work with?

In working on such a large problem space, it has been a privilege to work alongside and deeply with people from many different specialisations.

  • platform engineers
  • quality engineers
  • backend engineers
  • other frontend engineers
  • ux designers
  • data analysts
  • product owners/managers
  • copy editors
  • Agile coaches
  • marketeers
  • B2B sales
  • customer service
  • department, org and C-level management

What colleagues say about me in their linkedIn recomendations

Katarzyna: Data in User Experience Team at Trade Republic

Katarzyna worked with Alex on the same team

Any team that has Alex onboard can consider themselves lucky.

I have worked with Alex for nearly 2 years in Growth Team at AMBOSS. His user-centric mindset and passion for high-quality product had invaluable input to the successes of the team as well as the team dynamic itself.

What impressed me the most is how growth-focused, agile and open-minded Alex is. He would always seek feedback and encourage discussions: from technical solutions, through processes to work culture.

While being an engineer, he did not only do outstanding work in his area of profession. Alex took time to understand the user behavior, the nuances of the data world, which only accelerated his business understanding and impact.

I would be very happy to work with Alex again and I whole heartily recommend this experience.

Timo: Engineering Manager at AMBOSS

Timo managed Alex directly

Alex is an incredibly curious person; he enjoys deep-diving into new learning opportunities. He wields this curiosity as a tool to get involved in projects beyond the limits of his team.

This contributes to his understanding of the business and stronger connections to the company he works at. His Very British Humour and eloquence often make him a great conversationalist and an enjoyable person to work with.

As a Software Developer, he is very proficient in his craft and can quickly dissect problems and find solutions to them. He cares a lot about the quality of the code he interacts with and will work towards improving both readability and test coverage.

He is one of the people to whom you can paint a picture of the problem that needs solving and he will figure out the details from there without requiring guidance, but he will also raise any issues or uncertainties if he encounters them.

Alex has a strong drive to improve himself and he will seek out opportunities for this both on his own and from his manager.

I have been both Alex's colleague and people manager and would be glad to be either again.

Robert: Product Manager

Robert managed Alex directly

Alex is a chameleon that stands out.

While Alex has a very solid skillset in web standards, core JavaScript, testing and automation, I think what impresses me most about him is his ability to flexibly adapt and grow.

Over the course of our collaboration at AMBOSS, the company ran through different stages of engineering organization maturity.

Alex was always a part of this development in seeing the demands at hand, and using his experience or expanding his skillset to help our teams grow and bridge gaps. Whether it was setting up testing for our deployment pipelines across multiple teams, developing MVPs for new products to help our company grow, or mentoring juniors and coaching peers.

As a product manager I found his input to usability and accessibility invaluable. He always thought things through beyond requirements and feature briefs, encouraging a culture of open feedback and discussion.

I would be excited to work with Alex again.

Rubén: Building engineering teams

Rubén managed Alex directly

Alex is a passionate and nimble engineer that has a product-centric mindset.

When we worked together, he frequently advocated for striking where there was the most potential value and constantly challenged our priorities to help keep us focused. He reached beyond the team to get more data about the market and our users, and didn't mind stepping out of his comfort-zone to work on unfamiliar technologies when required.

Alex would be a great addition to any team that values customer-centricity, empowered engineering teams, and flexible product development.

Florian: Software Developer at AMBOSS

Florian worked with Alex on the same team

AMBOSS values people who can get stuff done and Alex embodied that spirit like few other people. Even though he joined our company as a frontend developer, he quickly showed that he can easily get up to speed in very different environments and tech stacks and deliver features that really make a difference. Among the many improvements he spearheaded in the frontend chapter, the one that stands out the most is when he identified our tests to be bottleneck for developer productivity. He subsequently came up with a proposal on how to improve things and saw the whole thing through to the end. This included working with developers from various teams and departments and definitely improved our ability, as a company, to deliver quality work with confidence. And all of this was driven by a desire to do meaningful work and keep an eye on the cost/benefit ratio. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he’s product manager at night and developer by day.

Another one of his qualities I always valued a lot is that he is not afraid to come up with solutions that don’t utilize mainstream technologies, since not everything needs to be hyper scalable right from the start. The tech landscape definitely needs more people like that!

Çağlar: Growth Product Manager at AMBOSS

Çağlar worked with Alex on the same team Software products are never complete and never perfect. When working with traditional teams, the product development process goes by the books, limiting agility and creativity due to the boundaries between different roles. Working with Alex is quite the opposite of that - where he’s agile and not limiting himself with the boundaries of roles, which helps the team to deliver better.

Alex’s good qualities are supporting a team a lot, both the discovery and delivery. His understanding of the user experience supports building new ideas, his skeptical approach to the ideas and data helps the team to focus on the right thing without leaving any details, and his experience helps deliver them properly.

His can-do attitude, skeptical approach, technical courage, data understanding, and communication skills would be something every organization would look for.

Antonella: Design Lead at AMBOSS

Antonella worked with Alex on the same team

Everyone would love to have a colleague like Alex, he is a dedicated person, and he tries to look at problems from all angles to see what is the best way to solve them. He takes ownership of the projects and can lead them. He works well with others and helps them, and tries to push others to become better. He knows how to talk and work together with others. He constantly looks for ways to improve and for opportunities to learn, and never settles for the status quo.

Jonathan: Engineering Leader, Technology Enthusiast, Chartered Engineer

Jonathan worked with Alex on the same team

While at AMBOSS, I ran a fast-track project to develop and deploy an SDK to better handle frontend events across the platform. This was needed urgently in response to event-data quality issues, which were believed to be linked to inconsistent application of our privacy software. Alex was one of the leading contributors to the SDK, and led the implementation across the majority of our product. He acted as a reviewing peer for many of the other project contributors, and also was the technical focal point for the automated testing of the product post implementation.

His positive attitude, sense of ownership and technical independence made him a really key success factor in the project, and I would be very glad to work with him again on future projects.

Show and Tell

An open source javascript library

I felt that there was no cohensive solution for the relatively common product desire to annotate text based on keywords, so I created one as a passion project.

It is very much under development, but seeks to bring together fast keyword matching with DOM annotation.

A Medium article about e2e testing infrustracture

After creating the end-to-end testing infrustrcture for AMBOSS GmbH to share some of the knowledge gained from the experience.

Experience

Frontend Developer at AMBOSS GmbH - Jun 2019 to Jun 2022 (3 years)

Alongside team-mates in the Growth team, I had the opportunity to create and own business-critical paths which were interacted with on average 3 million times a month, viz.

Frontend Developer and Co-Founder at Litem.co.uk - Jan 2016 to Jul 2020

Litem.co.uk was a tool, that I built from concept to deployment, that assessed a personal injury claim for injured cyclists. It gave advice based on the details of the accident and then generated a letter to be sent to the defendant. It had one of the most accurate valuation tools available.

Update in 2020 - I am very happy to announce that Litem was purchase by a London law firm specialising in legal tech who wish to integrate the logic, content and implementation into their suite of products.

React Developer at Bonial France - Mar 2019 to Jun 2019

Contracted to refactor an internal React web app to provide greater sturdiness and scalability, and test coverage as well as extending UI features and improving UX in collaboration with stakeholders.

Key Techs:

  • React Hooks
  • Typescript
  • Ramda
  • Jest with React-Test-Renderer and React-Testing-Library
React Software Developer at Medici Living Group - Aug 2018 to Mar 2019

I worked at Medici Living on both frontend web (React and business facing) and mobile development (React Native and client facing) for their flagship Quarters project.

Junior Frontend Developer with React.js as a freelancer - Oct 2016 to Jan 2018

Working with HTML, CSS, jQuery, Wordpress, Angular 1, React.js, Mobx, Redux, Styled-Components, SASS and Firebase to create websites and apps.

  • React.js 16
  • Styled-Components (CSS-in-JS)
  • SASS
  • Mobx (with and without decorators)
  • Redux (with Thunk)
  • Firebase (auth, database and hosting)
  • Material-ui, Semantic-ui, Reactstrap and Bootstrap 4 for UI components
  • Jest for testing
  • Helmet.js for SEO
  • React-GA for google analytics
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