Hi, I'm Alex.
I'm a San Francisco-based Frontend Web Engineer with over 10 years of industry experience. I'm currently working at Nextdoor, building software to help people connect with their neighbors and communities.
![Alex Cartmell](/static/headshot-7fb5fc0a45548e72308631356f501087.jpg)
About Me
I am a detail-oriented frontend web developer with over a decade of experience building beautiful and performant websites, ranging from simple static landing pages to complex interactive web apps. I excel at breaking down large complicated projects into manageable tasks, and pride myself on always delivering work on time. When I'm not writing code, I enjoy playing disc golf, hiking, and spending time with my wife and our two cats.
Contact Info
Education
Work
Zabble
Sole frontend web engineer on a lean startup team, responsible for all feature development and maintenance of the AI-powered "Zabble Zero" web application. Quickly ramped up on the product, codebase, and tech stack in order to provide as much value as possible during a four-month contract. Designed, implemented, and rolled out multiple major features, including a single sign-on authentication flow using SAML, and a data import feature allowing clients to bulk-upload facility and waste receptacle data into their Zabble account.
WeWork
Lead frontend engineer for WeWork's member-facing web app. Led a team of 6+ engineers on numerous initiatives, including new feature work, performance & stability improvements, and automated testing. Helped build the app all the way from a Create React App starter, replacing the legacy AngularJS implementation with a modern, performant, and maintainable single-page app. Strong focus on data and analytics, surfacing key takeaways to product managers in order to inform business decisions. Technologies included React, TypeScript, Sass, Storybook, and Apollo GraphQL.
Focused heavily on writing shareable code as NPM packages with intuitive & well-documented interfaces, in order to reduce redundancy across other WeWork web products. Examples included a shared design system built on TailwindCSS, a collection of components for in-app notifications, and a library for building map-based search experiences with Mapbox.
HopPlotter
Designed and implemented the technology behind beer tourism app HopPlotter from the ground up. The HopPlotter stack included a service-oriented architecture with RESTful APIs, built on a Python/Django and PostgreSQL backend; a rich single-page web app built on ES6, HTML5, and CSS3; native iOS and Android mobile apps built with Swift and Java; and interaction with over a dozen external APIs to collect, process, and present brewery data. Interesting challenges included building a combined username/password and Facebook authentication system, a notifications framework shared across multiple platforms, a performance analytics console for brewery owners, and a responsive mobile web app.
Expedia, Inc.
Full-stack web engineer for Expedia's corporate travel brand, Egencia. Worked on various parts of the stack, including a legacy C++ backend, a modern Java backend built on the Spring Framework, and frontend web (Backbone.js, jQuery). Interesting challenges included replacing an archaic credit card payment form with a simplified & streamlined AJAX design; developing a web service to integrate Egencia with a thirdparty expense management tool, automatically managing clients' expense data based on their travel plans; and implementing automatic travel booking logic following third-party approval, which allowed for price increases within a configurable threshold.