Jacob Twite

I'm a front end developer at Room & Board. I'm mainly responsible for the standard stuff for a developer, creating new features and maintaining the existing site. The fun is in the breakdown of what that actually means so here it is!

• Working with designers, business managers, project managers and UX (user experience) to deliver a web app that gives them the functionality they want while also being accessible, performant and reliable.
• Diagnose and fix the bugs that somehow end up in our project.
• Diagnose and fix performance issues which could involve optimizing a bottleneck in the code, figuring out how to reduce the HTML payload, lazy loading some of the codebase or... Ya there are a lot of things that can cause performance issues so I'm not going to be able to list them all here.
• Create and maintain unit tests to help reduce bugs, document code and reduce some of the nerves when committing your changes.
• Mentor our less experienced developers when they have a question or want help getting over a hurdle they've run into.
• Code review our pull requests before they hit the main branch
• Work with our QA department to create and maintain cypress tests for automated end to end testing.
• Research and evaluate whether our current technologies or approaches are still the right fit for us at that time.
• Help to set the standards for the team.
• Play pickleball
• Create, maintain and optimize the build process from the nextjs build configuration to the teamcity build and deploy process.

This was a pretty big journey in my quest to become a better developer. I was a junior developer when I first started and eventually climbed my way up to Software Engineer II. Throughout that journey I was responsible for:

• Working with my team to create and maintain the main midwest manufacturing website.
• Maintaining the internal company site.
• Updating and maintaining kiosk applications for designing interior / exterior doors, trusses and post frame buildings.
• Mentoring junior developers.
• Researching and pitching new technologies.