• Community
• Professional
• Education

Community

• Public Speaker in 9 countries: 27 conferences, 19 meetups, 7 barcamps, 16 podcasts, and one University lecture.
  • Events like JAMstack_conf (×2), Beyond Tellerrand, Smashing Conference (×5), CSSConf, and the first ever Tech Meetup at The White House.
• Technical Writer on zachleat.com, a Web Development Blog.
  • 332 posts since February 2007. On my writing,
    • Sarah Drasner said she “shaved full seconds off this big application […] by following some of Zach’s great materials […]”
    • Jeremy Keith twice said “Always ask yourself What Would Zach Do?”
    • Paul Irish called me “damn smart”—a debatable claim, to be sure.
  • 3,934,606 lifetime pageviews and growing. Read the most popular ones
• Conference Organizer and Co-founder of NEJS CONF.
  • 2015 to 2019: five conferences, 46 speakers, ~200 attendees per year.
• Lead Organizer for NebraskaJS, a JavaScript meetup.
  • 2012 to 2018: 1,666 members and growing, 50+ speakers, 90+ events.
• Open Source
  • Eleventy (☆ 17,132) creator and maintainer.
    • Used in production by Google, V8, W3C, Cern, MIT, Stanford, WebPageTest, CSS-Tricks, Netlify, Red Hat, and others.
    • Shipped 56 versions, with 10,192,772 downloads (npm), in use by 65K+ repositories (GitHub).
    • Three-time winner of the Google Open Source Peer Bonus Award in 2018, 2019, and 2022 and #1 Product of the Day on Product Hunt.
    • Addy Osmani called it “absolutely wonderful.”
    • Chris Coyier said it was “almost fascinatingly simple.”
    • Read more Eleventy testimonials from Mathias Bynens, Mina Markham, and others.
  • Implemented and documented font loading strategies for both CSS Tricks and Smashing Magazine.

Professional

• Lead Software Developer for Font Awesome
  Remote to Bentonville, AR USA
  • Sept 2024 to Present
• Creator and Maintainer of 11ty
  Remote
  • Nov 2017 to Present
• Developer Advocate for CloudCannon
  Remote to Dunedin NZ
  • August 2023 to May 2024
• Staff Engineer for Netlify
  Remote to San Francisco, CA USA
  • February 2022 to July 2023
  • Full time open source on Eleventy (read more above)
• Senior Web Developer for Netlify
  Remote to San Francisco, CA USA
  • January 2020 to February 2022
  • Migrated netlify.com to Eleventy and Vue, improving developer velocity, non-technical contributor workflow, and site performance.
  • Shipped new Eleventy-based marketing sites (on a dev team of two) under very tight deadlines: jamstack.org, Jamstack Conf (×3), Headless Commerce Summit, Jamstack Community Survey, Your Year on Netlify. Helped on the Million Devs project (Vue).
  • Developed serverless adapter to support live previews in Sanity CMS.
  • Learn more from 2022 or 2021.
• Web Developer for Filament Group
  Remote to Boston, MA USA
  • June 2012 to January 2020
  • Web development and consulting focused on a web for everyone: Performance, Responsive Design, Accessibility, and more. Personal specialties included web fonts, accessible forms, and responsive tables.
  Expand to learn more (×3)

  • Voted Agency of the Year, .net Awards 2015
  • Worked with clients like LEGO, Akamai, Global News, rent.com, salary.com, ebay, CNN, Forrester Research, attivio, Objective Logistics, RetailMeNot, Liberty Mutual, and more.
  • Standardized new project boilerplate and the release process for project maintenance.
• Front End Architect for Union Pacific Railroad
  Omaha, NE USA
  • June 2011 to May 2012
  • Responsible for setting the company's direction for mobile web application development.
  Expand to learn more (×3)

  • Developed a input-device independent reusable component library to serve both mobile web and hybrid native applications.
  • Ownership of all company auth pages, internal/external and mobile/desktop. Used progressive enhancement to expand device support.
  • Started an internal HTML5 and Open Web User Group to educate developers on new web platform features.
• Project Lead for Union Pacific Railroad
  Omaha, NE USA
  • July 2008 to May 2011
  • Lead developer and support team for company-standard User Interface library and pattern library documentation used on web projects. Supported a large developer base (~1500 employees and contractors).
  • Improved performance by reducing component initialization times between major versions by 5.2× using server side rendering.
  Expand to learn more (×3)

  • 62 separate reusable components across 5 simultaneous major code branches and over 50 versions.
  • Adapted to new i18n requirements and the marketing department's brand refresh, centrally applied to all web projects.
  • Prevented an Adobe Flexpocalypse by opposing adoption of Adobe Flex as the primary UI development tool using the merits of the Open Web.
• Web Developer for Union Pacific Railroad
  Omaha, NE USA
  • June 2006 to July 2008
  • Shipped three internal web apps, receiving ~15M hits per month.
  • Developed build process for automated deployment including asset optimization, linting, integration and unit testing.

Education

• Computer Engineering at University of Nebraska
  Lincoln, NE USA
  • August 2001 to May 2006
  • BS in Computer Engineering, Minor in Mathematics
  • Course Work in Semantic Web, Computer Architecture, Data Structures and Algorithms, Database Systems, Artificial Intelligence, Cryptography and Security, GUI and Unix Programming, Operating Systems and Kernels
  • Engineering Study Abroad program in
    Fortaleza, CE, Brazil

This resume has its highest fidelity when viewed in a web browser. You're invited to view the source code and it will print nicely (but do you need to?). Uses the h-resume microformat. Generated with updated data on October 29, 2024.