About Brian Pennington

I am a driven technologist and full-stack developer with a frontend specialization who is passionate about exploration, learning, and creating intuitive user experiences through technology to solve real problems.

Overview

I have six years of professional experience (as of 04/2023) in all aspects of delivering web-based applications, including the design and development of entirely new frontends, libraries, RESTful API, asynchronous workers, continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) pipelines, extract-transform-load (ETL) pipelines, and architectural design pulling from many proven and modern patterns.

UI/UX Specialist

While my experience expands across a vast spread of technologies and skills, my strongest foci within that experience are related to UX, learning and teaching, and the JavaScript ecosystem. I create well-designed, accessible, performant, and intuitive user experiences based on real data from a variety of feedback mechanisms (both internal and external) -- my goal is to build the product the company wants, and the product the user needs. To that end, I have a wide variety of experience in component frameworks (Vue, React, Angular), browser-native web components, building ui-kits, user-focused telemetry systems, and user interviews/focus groups to name a few. I have also worked with industry subject matter experts (SMEs) to help define and refine requirements for several products.

Developing and Modernizing Teams

During my last four years at Futuri Media, I successfully advocated for and implemented many aspects of "agile" [sic] development practices (including SCRUM methodologies), improving productivity and eliminating waste throughout the engineering organization, resulting in some cases to a 70% reduction in new defects, and taking time-to-deploy from weeks to hours/minutes. Full disclosure: it all began as an attempt at self-preservation, but quickly grew into a passion.

A Passion for DevOps

I worked with DevOps engineers to create fully automated CI/CD pipelines, which integrated testing and documentation generation along with the build & deployment processes. The organization went from struggling to deploy applications to finicky bare-metal servers, to a fully cloud-based, distributed, and containerized set of applications. This gave developers the ability to deploy a new environment in a few minutes by setting a few configs.

Institutionalizing Knowledge

I am also extremely proud to have overseen and developed continuous learning workshops throughout the engineering org. I love to learn (I would call this my top talent) and believe that one of the best methods to building great teams (and trust!) is by nurturing and institutionalizing knowledge. Having mentored many of our junior developers, I discovered several common gaps in understanding and used them to create new learning materials -- usually designed as 30-60 minute interactive modules. (example: Tooling Part 1). This was met with great enthusiasm and helped developers round out skills relevant and adjacent to their work.

Contact Me

If you are interested in my work, please contact me via any of the social links at the top-right of the page on desktop, and in the top nav for mobile views. I'd love to talk to you!