Sr. Frontend Developer
University of California, Merced
Nov 2023 - Present
I work on the Enterprise Technology team, focusing on frontend development for our in-house web applications. Here, I inherited several websites, all with different UI, architectures, and design patterns. During my tenure, I have been migrating the websites to share a common component library, thereby reducing the differences in building and managing the websites.
Like at every company, I wear many hats and helped migrate the department from BitBucket to GitHub. I now help manage our GitHub organization and have introduced several dozen pipelines to automate processes that were once time-consuming manual workflows. For example, the websites I inherited were built by separate contractors, and all have their own custom build and deployment processes. Now, all the websites I maintain have a uniform build process and pipeline for deploying the websites to their respective AWS environments (i.e., dev, test, or prod). My next step has already begun, and I am helping other teams bring automation to their workflows and processes.
As the only frontend developer on the team, there's a lot on my plate at any given time. To allow me to focus on the bigger tasks, I established the department's first student development team. Previously, students were primarily hired for service desk positions, where they troubleshooted, configured, and managed services, and occasionally built applications that were never deployed to production. My student development team, being the first of its kind in the IT department, has completed its first year as of August 2025. During this time, it has pushed 34 pull requests to production. This number is estimated to grow in the coming year with the expansion of my team from one student to 4 students. Starting this student development team has allowed me to continue mentoring and teaching junior developers.