Allons-Y Consulting

You're not going to learn code by passively watching someone else write it. You have to get into it, get really tangled up in it, and ask how you could make it better.

Collaborative Problem Solver
Meredith Magazine

Consulting

Allons-y (ah-lo(n)-zee) is an idiomatic French expression meaning roughly, "Let's go!"

That's exactly the energy this venture brings to the web. I'm looking to explore how we deliver web experiences at enterprise scale in a way that empowers developers to work in unison with each other and with their design counterparts.

Nothing makes me happier than exploring new technologies and implementing highly-optimized, clean solutions to complex problems.

Developer experience and accessibility are deeply important to me and these values guide the code that I produce and influence. One of the most enjoyable aspects of my job is open source community management; engaging with and connecting the contributors and consumers.

Web components

PatternFly Elements

This is a web component implementation of the Red Hat design system. It leverages the encapsulation of ShadowDOM and the power of custom properties to create well-scoped elements that are still designer-friendly. Elements are accessible, context-aware, and framework-friendly!

View the source code

Design system

Spectrum CSS

This is a CSS-focused library that expresses the design direction of Adobe's Spectrum design system. It is the foundation of the Spectrum Web Components styling and the internal React Spectrum library.

View the source code

Experience & passion

For 8 years at Red Hat I built design systems and their associated tooling to serve designers, developers, content writers, and users alike. My most valuable tool in this endeavor has always been active listening. I ask a lot of questions and work hard to understand what we're really trying to solve, for the business and for the user. Making tools that are fun and easy for developers is important to me and hopefully makes what I build an obvious choice over the option to "reinvent the wheel". If I do my job right, I let developers and designers work on cutting-edge work instead of having to construct the building blocks from stratch.

Adobe

Staff design engineer, Spectrum Design

Jan 2023—present

Implemented Storybook for Spectrum CSS as a tool for development, demo, and a means to bring visual regression testing in-house.
Spearheaded the Eleventy migration for the documentation site.

Senior web developer, Digital Imaging and Web Innovation

Jan 2023—present

Kicked off an inner source web components project—Unified Experience Components—combining smaller assets into larger patterns.

Red Hat

Principal front-end architect, User Experience Team, Digital Marketing

Apr 2020—Aug 2021

Open source community leader for PatternFly Elements and several repositories under the Red Hat Official organization; this involves responding to issues, code review, facilitating contribution through documentation, encouraging a healthy, positive community, building out project roadmaps, and getting stakeholder buy-in to fund dedicated developers.
Research and engage with the web component community around accessibility standards and approaches to theming components in distributed architectures.
Heavily engaged in the CSS Working Group and on GitHub for web component standards.
Engage designers, developers, and stakeholders in prioritization for building out a varied and robust set of design system components.
Cross-organization collaboration with development and design teams, both internal to Red Hat and with other large organizations such as Google, Fidelity, Penn State, and IBM.

Senior front-end architect, Digital Marketing Strategy & Design

Dec 2017—Apr 2020

Co-founder of PatternFly Elements
Technical lead for the redhat.com pattern library, which is used across multiple web assets within Red Hat; said library includes semantic markup, JavaScript interactions, JSON schemas for CMS consumption and JSON data for testing framework, and JavaScript (Mocha/Chai) for front-end visual regression testing.
Primarily responsible for code review and providing guidance, training, and feedback to pattern system contributors and front-end developers for redhat.com; organize cross-team training.
Expert-level Sass developer; optimizing CSS and making the system easy to use and update
Manage requirements, hours, testing, and deliverables via Rally, a project management tool, helping teammates with efficient timekeeping and working across our larger team to build templates and improve the efficiency of our reporting.
Agile team structure allows us to iterate on patterns quickly and provide continual improvements to our system.
Cross-browser testing, using site analytics to determine support levels.
Manage the build server including debugging any build issues, package and upgrade management.
Present our team's approaches, methodologies, and theories at technical conferences and bring back shared knowledge for implementation in our system.
Mentor fellow developers and students on technical and professional skillsets.

Front-end developer, UX Development tech lead

May 2016—Dec 2017

Lead, advocate, architect, and developed for a new component-driven design system; advanced Twig templating, Grunt tasks and logic, WebdriverIO for visual regression testing, advanced Sass functions and mixins.
Manage the build server including debugging any build issues, package and upgrade management.
Owner of front-end JavaScript for the web team; set and documented coding standards and built large library of include-able snippets for modular UI development.
Advocate and early adopter of flexible templating system for Drupal (utilizes the paragraph module); tech lead writing schemas which drive the admin interface, twig templates, and styles for this system.
Consult for other divisions concerning front-end user experience and design, including providing CSS styling, helping create mobile-friendly applications, and improve customer engagement.

User experience web developer/designer

Jan 2014—May 2016

Lead developer for Red Hat Summit's Drupal templates in PHP, outputs logic-based mark-up based on an API feed from Lanyon.
Design and build microsites advertising products and services - using thorough knowledge of HTML, Sass (and by-proxy, CSS), JavaScript.
Web lead for the web design and organization of the Training and About sections for redhat.com.
Building pages for major site redesign project in Drupal using Sass, HTML (with some HTML5 components) and advanced Javascript tools to create clean, efficient, modular design with sustainable code (development tools used: Compass, Jekyll, Gitlab).
Expertly managed the ticket queue for redhat.com main page and microsites, resolving web issues for customers and communicating with colleagues to maintain tight SLAs with excellent customer service, received several service awards for this work.
Managed content using CVS, then transitioned the team to git; took the lead in creating documentation and workflows, provided hands-on training to the team; wrote a few bash wrapper scripts to standardize process and workflows.
Consult for other divisions concerning front-end user experience and design, including providing CSS styling, helping create mobile-friendly applications, and improve customer engagement.
Business Analyst for Red Hat's online product store (and previously, Customer Portal).

SAS

Associate Technical Consultant

Feb 2013—Jan 2014

Consult customers using SAS with a third-party database, SQL optimization expertise.
Demo SAS products to customers, explaining different methods of creating a cohesive framework for data collection and management.
Experience with the full range of SAS Software - including Visual Analytics, DataFlux, Data Integration Studio, and related business tools.
Database optimization via DBMS and SAS code.
In-Database, In-Memory, High Performance Analytics - Teradata, Hadoop.
Oracle Database Administrator consult for large-scale, long-term project.
Research emerging technologies, internally and externally, to develop Best Practice and training documentation.

Associate Development Tester

Jan 2012—Nov 2012

Maintain physical & virtual Windows, Linux, HP images used in regression tests, includes maintaining software updates & installing testing tools.
Write, implement, & trouble-shoot regression tests, client & server-side.
Develop & monitor testing plans.
Perform, document deployment for embedded processing on the following databases: Aster, DB2 on AIX, DB2 on Linux, Greenplum, Netezza, Teradata, Hadoop, Oracle.
Manage MLE, macro, and international test suites for model processing in-database, about 300 tests, with bash script reporting results.
Design advanced web reporting tools using heavy PHP, CSS framework, Perl script backend that queries status & details across multiple server platforms based on information collected with an internal web crawler.
Upgrade & maintain a myriad of databases assigned to my testing group.
Programmed tests using SAS language, macros, & SQL.

R&D Technical Student on In-Database Products

May 2010—Jan 2012

Develop automated reporting tools on the status of various database platforms.
Develop Linux scripting tools to increase efficiency of common/repetitive tasks.
Regular installs on test environments for testing teams, both client & server side.
Testing & documenting install process for Linux & PC hosts.
Programmed tests using SAS language, macros, & SQL.
Improve online reporting tools & documentation, introduced PHP reporting to the group.
Designed advanced training programs for international resources.

Other

Publishing | Journals Production Editor, Oxford University Press

Sep 2007—Jul 2009

This position changed the course of my career. After completing a summer internship, I accepted a full-time position with this group; pausing my progress on an English degree from NC State for a chance to get real professional experience. Instead, what I learned was that publishing is 80% project management and only 20% actual editing; more than that, I enjoyed it! When the group rolled out a new software for tracking publications, I threw myself into detailed product testing and realized my love of computers could be a career. That led me back to college at Meredith to complete a Bachelors of Science in Computer Science by 2012. Read more.

Startup | Jr Web Developer, FlipKey

Nov 2012—Jan 2013

This role taught me a lot about web development and was my first experience professionally writing PHP. I got to experience the energy and innovation of a startup with the benefits of working right in downtown Boston, MA; still one of my favorite cities to this day. Read more.

Family-owned | Web Content Manager, Inside-Out Sports

Aug 2009—Jul 2010

This was a great experience working for a small, family-owned, local company helping them to realize the possibilities of hosting their content on the web. Read more.

Adobe

Senior design engineer, Spectrum Design

Jan 2023—present

Implemented Storybook for Spectrum CSS as a tool for development, demo, and a means to bring visual regression testing in-house.

Senior web developer, Digital Imaging and Web Innovation

Jan 2014—May 2016

Kicked off an inner source web components project—Unified Experience Components—combining smaller assets into larger patterns.

Red Hat

Principal front-end architect, User Experience Team, Digital Marketing

Apr 2020—Aug 2021

Open source community leader for PatternFly Elements and several repositories under the Red Hat Official organization; this involves responding to issues, code review, facilitating contribution through documentation, encouraging a healthy, positive community, building out project roadmaps, and getting stakeholder buy-in to fund dedicated developers.
Research and engage with the web component community around accessibility standards and approaches to theming components in distributed architectures.
Heavily engaged in the CSS Working Group and on GitHub for web component standards.
Engage designers, developers, and stakeholders in prioritization for building out a varied and robust set of design system components.
Cross-organization collaboration with development and design teams, both internal to Red Hat and with other large organizations such as Google, Fidelity, Penn State, and IBM.

Senior front-end architect, Digital Marketing Strategy & Design

Dec 2017—Apr 2020

Co-founder of PatternFly Elements
Technical lead for the redhat.com pattern library, which is used across multiple web assets within Red Hat; said library includes semantic markup, JavaScript interactions, JSON schemas for CMS consumption and JSON data for testing framework, and JavaScript (Mocha/Chai) for front-end visual regression testing.
Primarily responsible for code review and providing guidance, training, and feedback to pattern system contributors and front-end developers for redhat.com; organize cross-team training.
Expert-level Sass developer; optimizing CSS and making the system easy to use and update
Manage requirements, hours, testing, and deliverables via Rally, a project management tool, helping teammates with efficient timekeeping and working across our larger team to build templates and improve the efficiency of our reporting.
Agile team structure allows us to iterate on patterns quickly and provide continual improvements to our system.
Cross-browser testing, using site analytics to determine support levels.
Manage the build server including debugging any build issues, package and upgrade management.
Present our team's approaches, methodologies, and theories at technical conferences and bring back shared knowledge for implementation in our system.
Mentor fellow developers and students on technical and professional skillsets.

Front-end developer, UX Development tech lead

May 2016—Dec 2017

Lead, advocate, architect, and developed for a new component-driven design system; advanced Twig templating, Grunt tasks and logic, WebdriverIO for visual regression testing, advanced Sass functions and mixins.
Manage the build server including debugging any build issues, package and upgrade management.
Owner of front-end JavaScript for the web team; set and documented coding standards and built large library of include-able snippets for modular UI development.
Advocate and early adopter of flexible templating system for Drupal (utilizes the paragraph module); tech lead writing schemas which drive the admin interface, twig templates, and styles for this system.
Consult for other divisions concerning front-end user experience and design, including providing CSS styling, helping create mobile-friendly applications, and improve customer engagement.

User experience web developer/designer

Jan 2014—May 2016

Lead developer for Red Hat Summit's Drupal templates in PHP, outputs logic-based mark-up based on an API feed from Lanyon.
Design and build microsites advertising products and services - using thorough knowledge of HTML, Sass (and by-proxy, CSS), JavaScript.
Web lead for the web design and organization of the Training and About sections for redhat.com.
Building pages for major site redesign project in Drupal using Sass, HTML (with some HTML5 components) and advanced Javascript tools to create clean, efficient, modular design with sustainable code (development tools used: Compass, Jekyll, Gitlab).
Expertly managed the ticket queue for redhat.com main page and microsites, resolving web issues for customers and communicating with colleagues to maintain tight SLAs with excellent customer service, received several service awards for this work.
Managed content using CVS, then transitioned the team to git; took the lead in creating documentation and workflows, provided hands-on training to the team; wrote a few bash wrapper scripts to standardize process and workflows.
Consult for other divisions concerning front-end user experience and design, including providing CSS styling, helping create mobile-friendly applications, and improve customer engagement.
Business Analyst for Red Hat's online product store (and previously, Customer Portal).

SAS

Associate Technical Consultant

Feb 2013—Jan 2014

Consult customers using SAS with a third-party database, SQL optimization expertise.
Demo SAS products to customers, explaining different methods of creating a cohesive framework for data collection and management.
Experience with the full range of SAS Software - including Visual Analytics, DataFlux, Data Integration Studio, and related business tools.
Database optimization via DBMS and SAS code.
In-Database, In-Memory, High Performance Analytics - Teradata, Hadoop.
Oracle Database Administrator consult for large-scale, long-term project.
Research emerging technologies, internally and externally, to develop Best Practice and training documentation.

Associate Development Tester

Jan 2012—Nov 2012

Maintain physical & virtual Windows, Linux, HP images used in regression tests, includes maintaining software updates & installing testing tools.
Write, implement, & trouble-shoot regression tests, client & server-side.
Develop & monitor testing plans.
Perform, document deployment for embedded processing on the following databases: Aster, DB2 on AIX, DB2 on Linux, Greenplum, Netezza, Teradata, Hadoop, Oracle.
Manage MLE, macro, and international test suites for model processing in-database, about 300 tests, with bash script reporting results.
Design advanced web reporting tools using heavy PHP, CSS framework, Perl script backend that queries status & details across multiple server platforms based on information collected with an internal web crawler.
Upgrade & maintain a myriad of databases assigned to my testing group.
Programmed tests using SAS language, macros, & SQL.

R&D Technical Student on In-Database Products

May 2010—Jan 2012

Develop automated reporting tools on the status of various database platforms.
Develop Linux scripting tools to increase efficiency of common/repetitive tasks.
Regular installs on test environments for testing teams, both client & server side.
Testing & documenting install process for Linux & PC hosts.
Programmed tests using SAS language, macros, & SQL.
Improve online reporting tools & documentation, introduced PHP reporting to the group.
Designed advanced training programs for international resources.

Other

Publishing | Journals Production Editor, Oxford University Press

Sep 2007—Jul 2009

Startup | Jr Web Developer, FlipKey

Nov 2012—Jan 2013

Family-owned | Web Content Manager, Inside-Out Sports

Aug 2009—Jul 2010

This was a great experience working for a small, family-owned, local company helping them to realize the possibilities of hosting their content on the web. Read more.

Plugins

PostCSS Plugins

These utilities for PostCSS facilitate parsing and publishing enterprise-level design systems code for use in diverse framework ecosystems.

View the respositories

Automation

GitHub Actions

A growing set of GitHub utilities for managing large open source projects. Initial action is a configurable tool for automatically updating open pull requests.

View the repositories