Eric Chapman

Senior Software Engineer

FairyGodBoss•  July 2019 - March 2020

It was my privilege and honor to act as the front-end development lead for this mission-driven startup. My duties included day-to-day individual contributor tasks developing features for the React-driven front-end of our server-side rendered node app, participating in planning new features, identifying and planning solutions for systemic issues in the existing code base, answering lots of questions, reviewing the code of younger engineers and, my favorite, mentoring. I loved the tech team and also the company's leadership and miss them dearly. During my time there, in addition to other daily individual contributor tasks I took ownership of our front-end build process. One highlight is when I noticed that our images files were not being optimized. After explaining to the team leadership why this was a serious issue, impacting our SEO, I changed how our website was delivering those image files, drastically reducing file sizes, in some cases upwards of 90%, with no loss of quality. I did this by leveraging modern image and video formats, along with the HTML5 Picture and Video elements, wrapped in a react component that would take the original file path as a prop, along with pixel size constraints, and present the browser with a list of possible source variants to choose from depending on compatibility and device pixel density. Lazy-loading was built in, enabled by prop, so that images would not even attempt to load until they were scrolled into the viewport. This drastically improved the load time of the site.