My name's Vladimir and on the Internet, I go by "allejo."
I pretend to know what I'm doing as a developer solely because I can't live out my dream of taking part in interstellar space travel. I enjoy late night food runs, eating sushi, staring at my desktop legion, and occasionally playing on my PS4.
When I'm not building on BZFlag related projects or working on open source projects, I work as a software developer for Stack Overflow working on the Community Enablement team.
Since I'm not busy enough and am an advocate for open source projects, these are the projects/communities that I'm actively involved in and dedicate a lot of my spare time towards.
One of the first online games I discovered. I joined the community as a player and stayed as a developer.
- Member of the development team for the game and the web infrastructure
- Written several server plug-ins to introduce new game modes or help server administration
- Hosted the largest North American community run game servers
- Led the effort in launching a unified competitive league in the community
I hang around #jekyll on Libera and help out users. Some of my efforts for the Jekyll community have been through open source themes and unorthodox projects to solve common problems in Jekyll without the use of plug-ins.
I spent time on #socrata-soda on Freenode helping provide support for PHP users and general API help. Since I no longer use Socrata in the workplace or school, my participation in the community has diminished.
It's not all just open source and games for me; just like most people, I have bills to pay too. These are the awesome companies and organizations that have helped me do so over the years.
Software Developer
Stack Overflow
Jun 2021
I am currently working on the Community Enablement team, which largely focuses on improving existing moderator tools and preparing for this year's Winter Bash. I'm a full-stack developer but spend more of my time working on the front-end portion of the website, such as revamping our dated JavaScript codebase to be converted into modules and rewriting portions of the website to be accessible. Additionally, I contribute to Stacks (our CSS framework and component library) on a semi-regular basis with bug fixes or accessibility fixes/improvements.
Previously, I was on the Community Products Engagement team. On this team, I worked on the long-term effort of sunsetting Developer Stories and the Jobs platform. This project required improvements to our GDPR process to be self-serving for the Jobs platform, splitting up tightly coupled code from our monolith application, and deleting all related data spread out through several databases.
As a web developer for the central IT of the university, I actively led the development of multiple projects and managing a full team of student developers; my main focuses were software architecture, automation, code generation, and accessibility. I led the effort of building modular and reusable internal libraries designed to give development teams across platform a unified development experience.
Some libraries I designed include a framework for building API endpoints that can live on Lambda functions, a fully accessible front-end React component library, code generators, and documentation builders. Additionally, I maintained the Drupal 7-based website that powers CSUN's web presence and worked alongside the Universal Design Center (UDC) on improving its accessibility. Lastly, I managed the WordPress instances on campus that are used for our blogging network and course catalog.
I managed and mentored the student developers on our team ensuring they receive experience working on production-level projects and collaborating with other developers by using GitHub for all of our development and project management.
Web Developer
CSUN Associated Students
Jan 2014 -
Jun 2018
I worked as a part of the marketing team as a web developer maintaining the Associated Students website up to date with coming events and information about the services we provided. I did front-end development for the main website and built static websites for special events using Jekyll or stakx. I made sure that all of the organization's web pages were accessible and followed Section 508 requirements.
I built internal Symfony based tools and websites used for linking together different webhooks and APIs to our project management software; this allowed our team to use different services depending on our needs but were still able to use a single project management tool. Some of the components I built for these projects were made open source such as PhpPulse, a library for interacting with the monday.com API. These projects allowed us to have transparency with our clients as we gave them to ability to view the status of their project and communicate with the team more freely.
Web Developer Intern
City of Santa Monica
Jun 2013 -
May 2018
I was a part of Santa Monica's web development team where I worked on building and maintaining city websites; additionally, I contributed to several of their open source projects. Some of the bigger projects I worked on was building search functionality for the Historic Resources Inventory database, publishing our website analytics, redesigning the BigBlueBus website to be mobile responsive, moving all Team Foundation Server repositories to Git, and getting automated previews for pull requests against our static websites.
During the summers of 2014, 2015, and 2016, I worked with the community broadband division and helped run the Youth Tech Program where I wrote the web development curriculum and served as the lead web development instructor. I covered topics such as, Git, GitHub Pages, and using Bootstrap to build mobile-responsive websites.
The Classroom Technology Committee (CTC) is an ad-hoc working group reporting to the Advisory Committee on Academic Technology, comprising stakeholders and individuals with an interest in ensuring the effective use of classroom technologies.
Even though hearing the sound of my own voice weirds me out, other people like hearing me talk about things I've managed to accomplish.
Student success is something every team on campus strives to achieve but that doesn't mean they achieve it. During my 2.5 years tenure on the web development team, I managed nearly a dozen students; mentoring them and teaching them how to work on real-world applications.
I talk about an "unorthodox" view of student success and why it's impactful to students in the field of technology; because let's face it, a lot of adults don't remember what it's like trying to get their first job. I also talk about what I learned on what worked and what didn't while managing students.
California State University, Northridge has finally joined in the fun of modern development practices! Here we talk about how we're using the following,
- CI for running unit tests, linting, and security scans
- CD for deploying from Git branches automatically to our staging and production environments
- Terraform for automatically creating and updating our infrastructure in AWS
California State University, Northridge has started to see the evils pains of managing hundreds of VMs. We talk about how we have stopped waiting weeks for other teams to create VMs for developers and how we're using Kubernetes to make applications incredibly easier to maintain.
I occasionally take part in code related competitions whenever I'm invited to do so. Here are some notable mentions of competitions I've participated in and the work I did during the said competitions.
I participated in Docker's Docs Hackathon to help improve their documentation website. I'm not familiar enough with Docker to be able to update/write documentation so I participated in a way I could still benefit the community: I submitted pull request #2860, which improved the responsive behavior of the website and reduced the redundancy of certain aspects of the site's Jekyll code. This single pull request fixed several known issues that existed and several issues that hadn't been reported yet.
I participated in CSUN's first annual AppJam event with a team of friends to create Coral Finance—a sandboxed financial stock application. The goal of this app was to expose students to the stock market risk-free by simulating purchases of real stocks to show profit or losses. I created a fake stock market, accessible through an API, which moved at a quicker pace than the real stock market to see quicker results.
- Branding, UI/UX - Raymond Barrios
- iOS Developer - Kyle Shaver
- Motion Designer - Danilo De Leon