Benny Powers Web Developer

Jerusalem, Israel 🇮🇱 🇨🇦
Contact web@bennypowers.com 054-482-5726

To book a live mentoring session, find me on codementor.io. For all other enquiries, please email me.

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A passionate, creative, and curious programmer, I specialize in Progressive Web Apps using open web standards like custom elements, shadow DOM, and service worker.

I care about F/OSS and engineering standards, preferring comprehensive solutions over band-aid hacks that add technical debt. An autodidact, my current interests include functional JavaScript, and algebraic data types.

I excel when I have a sense of ownership over my work, and when my teammates share my enthusiasm. I'm a strong written communicator, English is my native tongue. I'm also proficient in Hebrew.

I'm a regular OSS contributor: I open issues and contribute pull requests, and have released a collection of my own F/OSS web components.

You can find me in chatrooms asking questions and helping others, I enjoy being a part of a community of learners.

The company that hires me is looking for a motivated, tenacious individual; someone whose goal is to learn, grow, and produce excellent software. They value creative expression, community contribution, two-way dialogue between management and development, and seek to generate job satisfaction for their team.

Highlights

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Experience

Principal UX Engineer

- Red Hat
Remote (Israel)

Maintained and updated design systems. Contributed to upstream open source projects. Implemented developer tooling. Maintained NPM packages. Worked across multiple organizations with different constraints. Mentored students and peers.

Technologies

Senior Software Engineer

- Aqovia
Remote (UK)

Bootstrapped a GraphQL web application. Participated in architecture decisions. Worked in a team to deliver value in a complex business domain. Used Microsoft Azure cloud to deploy static sites, serverless functions, and associated accoutrements.

Worked in an "agile" team to track cycle times and respond to changing requirements. Mentored peers and junior developers in web technologies like web components, GraphQL, and TypeScript.

Worked with data scientists to improve Python engineering standards and performance.

Technologies

Senior Software Engineer

- Forter
Tel Aviv

Lead development of a comprehensive library of UI web components, e.g. text fields, dropdown menus, etc. Developed and maintained new features for a complex B2B dashboard web app. As part of this project, we incrementally updated our legacy front- and back-end stack using web components, while avoiding "The Big Rewrite".

Mentored peers & junior developers in web technologies like WAI-ARIA, ES2019, Custom Elements, DOM, functional JS.

Helped develop the company's Open Source offerings, and contributed to developer tools both in CI/CD (GitHub Actions) and in the front-end stack using webpack, rollup, yarn, etc.

Technologies

Mentor

- Udacity
Remote

As a student mentor, engaged with the students assigned to me through private messages, encouraging them, answering their questions, sharing resources, and generally being there for them. Helped the general student population online via Slack, for example by leading technical AMAs. Integrated third party services in a declarative, product-oriented API.

Reviewed student submissions, providing feedback and approving their projects according a rubric.

Technologies

Tech Lead

- Blink.gg
Jerusalem

Built a PWA frontend and GraphQL server combining app and third party data in a declarative, product-oriented API. Techniques included functional programming, code splitting, tree-shaking, precaching, and lazy-loading to improve loading performance.

Implemented TDD and CI/CD with unit and integration testing on front- and backend. Used AWS web services (lambda, API gateway, cloudfront) to continuously deploy microservices.

Wrote an open-source component base class (~4.5k downloads) which reduced our boilerplate by dozens of lines of code per file.

Mentored coworkers through design and code review, tech talks, and documentation.

Technologies

Web Developer

- UX Web Technologies
Beit Shemesh

In June of 2016, was brought on board to manage WordPress projects, and soon became the lead developer for special projects and apps. Designed and coded several apps using polymerfire. My experience with a11y, UX, and graphic design contributed to the success of a number of projects.

Led a number of initiatives at the company to improve the company's agility and scalability, including CI/CD pipelines, Slack, GitLab, and a trello-based sales funnel.

Technologies

Freelance Web Developer

- Freelance
Jerusalem

As a freelance dev, worked on a variety of projects using a range of technologies.

Built apps using Polymer, AngularJS, firebase, nodejs, Bootstrap, and Stripe.js, including a donation app for a local charity.

Conducted web performance reviews to reduce clients' load times up to 75%, Increase lighthouse performance scores from 0 to over 90.

Was consistently listed as featured mentor on codementor.io, receiving 5.0 ratings. Helped mentees solve their programming challenges. By consulting, debugging, and suggesting novel approaches, brought value to mentees and their businesses.

Focused on HTML/CSS, JavaScript and the DOM; and web APIs like custom elements, payment request API, etc. Helped mentees with projects in all major frameworks (react, Vue, and Angular), as well as Ruby and PHP.

Helped mentees establish CI/CD pipelines, write unit tests, write and handle REST APIs, and deploy microservices, among other things.

Technologies

Qualifications & Education

Certificate of Achievement in Functional Programming

This online course explored the concepts of functional programming using the Haskell language. The course covered standard functional programming techniques, as well as some advanced concepts, which were applied to realistic programming problems.

Mobile Web Specialist Certification

Certified in Progressive Web App technologies: Service Worker, accessibility, performance.

Open Source

Apollo Elements

Developed and maintained the pre-eminent web components integration for GraphQL apps with over 250 stars, comprehensive documentation, and recognition from Apollo Graphql and Prisma on their YouTube streams.

Stripe Elements

Web components implementation of Stripe's payments form. Recommended by Stripe engineers for use in shadow DOM.

Open Web Components

Core team member of open-wc, a collective of web components authors, users, and maintainers. Our tools and recommendations are in use by companies large and small including Google, ING bank, Red Hat and others

And more