Nicholas Hirsch

I've worked in the frontend as an individual contributor at Zynga & Amazon. I've also worked in the frontend as a dev. lead/manager. Each experience was unique and exposed me to a different problem space. I've done the following professionally: - Develop an ads JS library for interfacing with Zynga's home grown ads server. - Develop a frontend internal tool for generating & slicing/dicing PnL statements for the retail org at Amazon. - Led the development of an internal CMS and an external content driven site with a focus on monetization through SEO at Blucora. At this point in my career, I've seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. I prefer loose coupling, functional/stateless design, and highly readable code as much as possible. Code is write once, read many many many times. I've been around the block with jQuery, Backbone, Angular, and now React. I heavily prefer React + Redux. It's a fundamentally good architecture that yields great code. In addition, I've done small amounts of work on mobile, whether it was iOS and Obj-C (Zynga), iOS and Ionic/Cordova (previous client), or Android and Unity (current company).

My primary backend experiences have been at Microsoft as well as scattered experiences while doing frontend development in my other roles. At Microsoft I helped develop a V2 platform piece that lived in the middle tier of Bing and executed workflows to gather and deliver all data necessary to serve up search results for a given query. At Zynga/Amazon/Blucora/Beyond, my backend experiences have been as a consumer via the frontend with a healthy amount of configuration, provisioning, and power use. I'm familiar enough with standard RDBMS, migration lifecycles, etc... I'm conversant in the technologies surrounding OLAP and star schema, whether it be Redshift, ETLs, data cubes, etc... Currently I'm enamored with Serverless architectures that make heavy use of AWS via API Gateway, Lambda, SQS, SNS, SES, S3, DynamoDB streams, etc... In addition, I also like the many services that exist outside AWS like Firebase, Auth0, Netlify, Twilio, etc...

My leadership experience comes from two different areas. I've grown as a leader through the management of others, and I've grown in my abilities to craft business strategies to navigate the small firm that I currently run with my business partner. As far as management is concerned, I started by managing intern projects and worked my way up to managing a team of up to 5 frontend engineers. I'm very much in the camp of Andy Grove and his management philosophies detailed in High Output Management. As a manager, I should be judged solely on the collective output of those under and around me, and my two main functions should be motivation and training. Proper motivation of others requires interpersonal skills and a deep understanding of the person across the table. Training requires patience, clarity of thought, and clarity of communication. I'm happy to say that my time spent leading/managing has given me a chance to practice both.