Erik Gillespie

Much of my Java experience has been with developing large, scalable, enterprise web applications. In the past 6 years I have been focusing more on rapidly developing scalable REST APIs with Java.

I find REST and HTTP APIs fascinating. Most of my time coding outside of work has focused on understanding RESTful principles and applying them to API design in a practical, scalable way and sharing my thoughts and opinions on the matter with others.

Used Firebase for university education software that offers custom authentication, complex and strict security rules, and both client- and server-side data access.

My desire to learn about techniques to rapidly develop scalable REST APIs, I have steered towards stateless applications built on Node.js. The transition has been fairly natural since Node.js nicely combines my years of JavaScript, shell scripting, and API design experience.

Most of the 17 years have been for JavaScript client-side or in the web browser. In the past couple of years I have taken a larger interested in using JavaScript server side and also exploring new paradigms of developing web apps, such as creating single-page applications.

My whole career has involved developing web applications. HTML and CSS have been vital to my success as a web app developer.

I regularly use jQuery to provide quick client-side functionality that isn't invasive or require overhauling an existing application's pages. I have also built reusable web components and client libraries for APIs using jQuery.