Who am I?
Allow me to introduce myself: I’m Brad Azevedo, a UI engineer who loves building pretty things. I began my journey in the days of FrontPage (with which I built the very first website for my high school) and made a rather circuitous tour through college, where I earned a degree in visual design. I found that design wasn’t exactly my bailiwick, so I returned to web development, where my true passion lies. I’ve since spent more than a decade riding the rollercoaster from those early days of WYSIWYGs to the incredibly dynamic and complex ecosystem that it has become.
My untraditional (read: primarily self-taught) background has served as the incubation tank in which I developed an interest in both design and development. I stumbled into my role as a UI engineer through years of collaboration with design, product and engineering teams, working to define products, identify edge cases and opportunities to simplify the build process by not reinventing the wheel, and, from time to time, heeding the advice of Coco Chanel: “Simplicity is the keynote of all true elegance.” To that end, I’ve worked with design teams to establish a common design language—and to some degree a style guide—with which we built new components that felt clean, consistent and reusable.
A scary thing crossed my desk a few years ago: webpack. What am I to make of this confusing graphic with all these little boxes being neatly packed into one? Sorcery, I thought, but as it turns out, something closer to wizardry. The mental leap from the old school of jQuery and Sass into this world of webpack was indeed a tough one to grapple with, but I realized the benefits shortly after the glaze wore off of my eyes. I dove into React and thought, “ZOMG, this JSX business is killing me”, but five minutes later I was among the converted. ES6 is now called ES2015, you say? I resisted CSS-in-JS because that’s against the rules, damn it, but I spent some time with styled-components and ate my words.
All this is to say that the web has come a long way since FrontPage and I’ve embraced this evolution in tooling and frameworks in my noble quest to build delightful, thoughtful user interfaces. I strive to expand my skill set and learn new ways to approach a problem. New frameworks come and go more quickly than ever, and while it’s impossible to know them all, I’m confident in my ability to pick them up; I can, after all, read documentation like the best of them.
What am I looking for?
I’m looking for a role in which I can reignite my passion for building awesome UIs while contributing to a product that pushes boundaries and challenges convention. I enjoy collaborating with other teams and being part of the process more than spending eight hours a day stuck in my code editor.
I’m looking to join a team that:
- respects and encourages one another and doesn’t bog itself down with egos and inflexibility
- respects that education is an ongoing process and encourages growth
- recognizes that teams are more successful with members with complementary skills, not identical skills
What do I value?
- Clear communication and focus
- Providing and hearing alternate perspectives, even if they challenge the status quo
- Oxford commas and the proper use of em and en dashes
- Simplicity over complexity
- Trust and respect among teammates
- Meditation and generally taking time for mental health
- Relative autonomy