Hello, my name is Liam Hall and I'd like to work with you at Tailwind Labs as your new Design Engineer.
Work history
July 2022 - Present
Senior frontend engineer
I was hired by KatKin in the summer of 2022 as the sole Frontend engineer alongside 4 backend engineers. KatKin is a non-tech start-up that prioritizes speed of execution and short-term wins over long-term goals. An adjustment that has taught me that sometimes you need to move quickly and compromise as a business but cemented my feelings that code should always be well thought out and well tested. I've worked on some interesting and challenging tasks in my time at KatKin, most notably a custom form builder powered by StoryBlok, the form builder allowed the growth team to create custom sign-up flows without tech involvement. The builder has features like interpolation, A/B testing, conditional fields, conditional form sections, and conditional components to name a few. Personally, I think using tools like StoryBlok for such complex work creates more issues than it solves but it was a business ask and it made for some creative problem solving.
Tailwind • React • Next • Typescript • Jest • Cypress
March 2021 - January 2022 / January 2022 - May 2022
Senior engineer / Lead engineer
I joined Whirli in March 2021 as a Senior Engineer and after 10 months was promoted to a Lead. Whirli was an early innovator in circular economy platforms. On the face of it, Whirli was a Toy subscription business with a token system, it allowed parents to pay a monthly subscription to receive toys for their children and trade them for new ones when they got bored or grew out of them. At its heart, Whirli was a software company that created products that could be white labeled for any circular economy business. Software decisions are Whirli were always well thought through and implementations well tested. As well as the customer-facing application, we created custom warehouse software for circular economy businesses as well as a custom content management system for product, customer, and order management amongst other things. While all the engineers worked across all 3 platforms, I was lucky enough to lead the team in the development of the Warehouse software. Whirli was VC funded and poised to sign for its next round of funding, however sadly in May 2022 the investors pulled out, citing the war in Ukraine and fears of a UK recession, the next day Whirli went into administration and we were all made redundant. I believe Whirli was bought and restarted last year.
Vue • Nuxt • Laravel • Typescript • Jest • Cypress • PHPUnit
February 2019 - May 2021
Frontend engineer
I always loved the Natural History Museum so I was very excited to land a role there. Coming from a very small team working on Greenfield projects, The Natural History Museum posed a lot of new challenges for me. They had a huge legacy code base (with zero tests) which combined with a large hierarchical organization made decision-making slow and releases nerve-wracking! Despite these shortcomings, I have fond memories of my time at the Museum. Some highlights include: Working on the Wildlife Photographer of the Year application, building the Itinerary Planner designed to aid the 5 million visitors they welcome annually, and of course there's nothing quite like walking past a 150 million year old Stegosaurus on your morning commute! Plus, I'm happy to say by the time I left, the code base had some tests.
Vue • React • jQuery • Jest •
October 2015 - December 2018
Management
In 2015, at 25, I was offered the opportunity to run my local Pub with my younger brother for a set period. It was great fun and something I wouldn't change for the world but I was very happy to be back coding full time. During my time running the pub, I did some freelance work under the name "Three Bears" on the side and continued to up-skill by learning Vue JS.
Management
July 2022 - Present
Web developer
LinedUp was my first developer role out of University and I couldn't have asked for a greater introduction to the industry. We were a small team: The founder and I plus a freelance designer worked on every single project. For the first year, I was mentored closely and learned a lot but was very quickly trusted to take on my own clients and projects. We primarily worked on greenfield codebases and for a variety of businesses, from cold water surf brands to national furniture retailers, as well as some niche applications like mapping tools, which I can't believe are still live to this day. My Boss had a keen eye for design and details, which as a Graphic design graduate was a wonderful fit.
Laravel • jQuery • Shopify •
Education
September 2009 - May 2012
Graphic Design - BA First-Class (Hons)
I joined the Arts University Plymouth (formally Plymouth College of Art) in 2009 thinking I wanted to be a Graphic Designer, I left in 2012 knowing I wanted to be a software developer. I loved art throughout my childhood and spent countless hours in Photoshop throughout my teenage years. In our second year, we were offered a module to learn basic HTML and CSS and I became hooked, from there I taught myself PHP and jQuery. Luckily for me, my course was very flexible and I spent my entire final year teaching myself and writing about web design and development, my final project was an ambitious "Facebook for creatives", the project had authentication, friend requests, notifications, feeds and post creation (The code was not pretty). I finished University with a First Class Honors degree.
Open-source
Life, day to day
I live in Cornwall, England, with my partner Cecily and my dog Ohto. We live in a quiet village, 5 minutes from the beach in 3 directions, one village over from where I grew up. Currently, I still travel once a month to London for work but I've worked remotely since 2020 so am very used to working in my own company or over video calls.
I tend to start my mornings fairly early around 5:30 AM - 6:00 AM before going to the gym followed by a long walk with my dog, Ohto. Although I tend to prefer early starts, should we need more cross-over time once in a while, that shouldn't be a problem. My partner works in Los Angeles 6 months a year and works EST when at home so we're very used to working outside of standard UK hours in our household.
Outside of my work, I like to spend time with friends. We're very lucky to walk a very short walk from some of our closest friends. Together we enjoy football, badminton, live music and some of us have recently started making music together again. Unfortunately, the local music scene isn't quite what it was when we were in our teens but there are who knows, of a resurgence?
Aside from seeing friends, I've spent the past year renovating my house, which is a lot more work than I'd ever imagined so I'm pleased to say we are finally in! Before taking on the project I had zero experience in renovation and have learnt a huge amount along the way!
I also like to keep myself in the loop with the ever changing dev landscape, the start-up culture at KatKin doesn't allow much time for learning, it's all about doing. So in my own time I like to listen to podcasts like Syntax FM (and once upon a time Fullstack radio), I also subscribe to various developer content platforms like Laracasts, follow lots of devs on Twitter, including most, if not all the Tailwind labs team and keep my eye out for interesting articles on Dev.to and Medium
Knowledge sharing
I think knowledge sharing within the dev community is really important. As a self-taught developer, without the kindness of others' knowledge sharing, I'd be nowhere. I want to continue to give back to the community by sharing my knowledge. Many of the articles I've written over the years have come off the back of conversations with Junior developers.
With the chaos of renovating a property, I've not written many articles over the past year but once we settle in properly, it's something I'd like to return to. Here are a few articles I wrote prior to the renovation-induced hiatus:
So, why me?
I believe my background makes me a great fit for the Design Engineer role at Tailwind. From studying Graphic Design to my professional experience across many different sectors, self-motivated open source libraries and eager to help others through knowledge sharing. I have a genuine enthusiasm for front-end development and developer experience. I've followed Tailwind since the beginning and love what you have all achieved so far and I'd love to be part of the next chapter.
With my extensive professional experience across both React and Vue, I feel I could quickly begin to contribute to existing Tailwind products like Tailwind UI and Catalyst.
I believe years of creating bespoke solutions, across different sectors, helps me to understand and appreciate the importance of flexibility vs simplicity, ensuring the best experience for developers and users. I think makes me a great candidate to contribute to projects like Tailwinds scroll-driven animations and Text Shadow support.
I'm a self-taught developer, which I think gives me a particularly good insight into how to break down more complex concepts, I think would aid me in helping Tailwind users understand how to use more complicated features.
Beyond code and teaching, I have experience in creative suits like Adobe, so creating promotional assets like images shouldn't be a problem. I also have a genuine interest in learning new tools.
Hopefully, all of this has given you a fairly good overview of me as a person and as a professional. There's plenty more I'd love to discuss but either way, I look forward to your feedback!