Joe Brown - Full Stack Developer
I'm Joe Brown, a 23 year old full-stack web developer who specialises in the frontend.
I'm passionate about Vue and React, and have professional experience with both. I'm also a very strong proponent of TypeScript.
Software development has always been a keen interest of mine. I have been experimenting with all sorts of programming languages since I was 12 years old, in areas including web development, game development, and mobile application development.
One of my proudest achievements is a mobile game I created, at 15 years old, using Unity. It has garnered over 600,000 downloads on the Google Play Store. During its peak, I was receiving over 50,000 downloads per month.
Experience
⚡️ GivEnergy
March 2024 - Present
I joined GivEnergy in March 2024 as a mid-level full-stack developer.
GivEnergy is the UK's top provider of residential battery storage systems. They supply the hardware and software to empower homeowners to take control of their energy usage.
I am currently architecting and leading the development of a new cross-platform mobile application, using React, Ionic, and Capacitor.
My role includes mentoring junior developers and up-skilling existing members of the team in areas such as TypeScript, React, CSS and various core aspects of web development.
I am also working on a new serverless event-driven service that ingests IoT data and calculates energy usage in near real-time.
Working on this service has taught me an enormous amount about AWS and the structure of complex backend systems.
🍻 Premier Systems
July 2021 - February 2024 (2 yrs 8 mos)
I worked as a frontend developer on BrewMan - one of the UK's leading brewery and distillery management solutions.
I joined Premier Systems for my placement year at university. Soon after joining, I became an integral member of the team, owning a variety of complex frontend tasks.
After my placement year ended, I continued to work at Premier Systems part-time during my final year at uni, and then came back to work full-time as a Graduate Software Engineer.
My first project at Premier Systems was to re-build our corporate site from scratch, using Nuxt. This project ignited my passion for web development. It also introduced me to the concept of server-side rendering, and the benefits and drawbacks to various rendering strategies.
I quickly became competent in Vue and TypeScript. I worked with mixture of legacy Options API and class components. I also worked with, and championed the migration to, the Vue 3 Composition API plugin.
Whilst I primarily worked in the frontend, my role evolved to include backend work too, using C# and PostgreSQL.
Key achievements at Premier Systems:
- Created a scalable, TypeScript-based UI system to improve code reuse and type-safety across the most commonly used areas of BrewMan.
- Migrated our proprietary authentication system to Firebase and wrote admin tools in Node.
- Drastically improved performance on the FE as the business grew - refactoring and optimising core parts of the codebase.
- Championed Vue 3 migration.
- Created a customisable dashboard page, frontend and backend, that became the new homepage of BrewMan.
- Mentored a new mid-level developer, bringing them up to speed on the codebase and the technology stack.
- Played a crucial role in the migration of our most complex and widely-used component, our bespoke grid, to AG Grid, ensuring backwards API compatibility. Owned the most complicated part of the migration: customisable grouping and aggregation of thousands of rows.
- Retrofitted dark mode support, which involved significant CSS refactors to all parts of the app.
- Championed Cypress E2E testing.
- Added new features and performance optimisations to our Progressive Web App, used by delivery drivers.
Education
📚 Bournemouth University
September 2019 - June 2023
I started uni in September 2019, studying Computing. I changed my degree title to Software Engineering before I started my final year.
Key modules studied:
- Software Quality and Testing
- Advanced Development
- Deep Learning
- Networks and Cyber Security
- Systems Design
- Data and Databases
My Final Year Project was a web-based CRM application designed for sales representatives of breweries and distilleries, that integrated with BrewMan. It was built using requirements gathered from the sales team at Premier Systems.
Bournemouth University was so impressed with my dissertation that it was used as an example for future final year students.
📖 Barton Peveril Sixth Form College
September 2017 - June 2019
My time at Barton reinforced my passion for software development, and concreted my decision to pursue a career in the software industry.
For my 2nd year computer science project, I built a maze-solving CLI application in VB.NET that implemented both Dijkstra's algorithm and the A* pathfinding algorithm.
This application parsed an image of a maze, with a start and end point, and output the same image overlaid with the shortest path between the two points. It also rendered the path finding process in the console, step by step, animated in real time.
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