Hello, there. I’m a Venezuelan-American web developer based in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, right in the heart of Grand Teton National Park. I’ve been building websites for over 20 years, and I’m currently a Senior Engineering Manager at Vox Media, where I lead a team charged with building first-class editorial tools for journalists across the world. Previously at Vox, I’ve led multiple teams as engineering manager & lead engineer, including the Services team, bringing Chorus to newspapers such as the Chicago Sun-Times, Deseret News, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune; the Revenue Platforms team, helping build better advertising tools & products for our networks; and the Performance team, helping make our sites as fast as possible. I was also a Senior Front-End Engineer at The Verge, helping build a sweet, responsive, better performing site, as well as cool editorial features like Fanboys and The Verge 50.
In my free time, I’m also a wildlife & landscape photographer, and you can see some of my work on my website, All-Encompassing Trip. This year one of my photographs, Close Encounter at Antelope Flats, was chosen as one of the four highly commended photos in London’s Natural History Museum’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year, People’s Choice Awards.
Source code for my website, if you’re curious.
A simple, fast photoblogging CMS built in Ruby on Rails which features responsive, high-resolution images, a customizable posting schedule, social media management and syndication, a GraphQL API, and more.
A hilarious Sinatra-based Markov bot for Slack.
An Alexa skill to get Dark Sky weather forecasts.
An Alexa skill to manage status and notifications in Slack. Alexa, tell Slack I'm out for lunch until 3:00 pm.
An addictive Jeopardy! bot for Slack. Fun fact, after I added this to my work Slack I was told to limit it to a single channel because productivity ground to a halt. (Five years later, the #jeopardy channel is still going strong.)
A tweet aggregator I built a few years ago with Python and Google App Engine, which provided live coverage via Twitter of the 2009 constitutional amendment referendum in Venezuela.
An example of a Middleman-powered editorial app built by the Vox Media Product Team and published by The Verge.
A recap of the performance work my team at Vox has done in the past year.
A little CSS technique I wrote for making elements with a fixed ratio that can also be constrained to a maximum height.
Here’s how you can use the new -webkit-backdrop-filter property, to build cool iOS-like transparency effects with CSS.
We’ve made the source code to The Verge 50 public so people can hopefully learn from it and use it to tell their own stories.
A few of my favorite things, on The Verge.
A quick summary of the improvements we made to The Verge with the release of version 1.8.
A technique to improve infinite or endless scrolling using the HTML5 History API.
In this interview, I talked to Ally MacDonald about how companies can make the shift to being “performance-first” at both a technical and organizational level.
My coworker Dan Chilton and I spoke to Ethan Marcotte and Karen McGrane about how we helped build a culture of performance at Vox Media.
View my photography at All-Encompassing Trip, view it again (but smaller) on Instagram, check out my repos on Github, add me to your professional network (ugh) on LinkedIn, or email me at contact@gesteves.com.
