Jess Bees
software engineer
Jess is a software engineer and artist with experience developing server and client web applications. Their present interests include teaching tech literacy and exploring WebAssembly.
- Ruby, Ruby on Rails
- JavaScript, Node, Express
- Rust
- React, React Native
- CSS, Sass
- SQL, Postgres
- nginx
- WebAssembly
Languages & Technologies
- Web app & API development
(backend, frontend, styling, db, caching layers) - Webpage performance tuning
- Deployments
- Pink-on-black color schemes, apparently
Skills
HuffPost • Sr. Software Engineer, Architect
HuffPost Mobile Website
Co-architected HuffPost's (then The Huffington Post) first dedicated mobile website: a Ruby on Rails application that now serves all of HuffPost's traffic.
HuffPost Desktop Website
Adapted HuffPost's mobile website to handle all web traffic. Maintained frontend code, backend code, and server health, through two major rebranding efforts.
Editorial CMS
Architected and developed custom internal CMSs, notably one for publishing content to HuffPost's landing and vertical pages, using a Ruby on Rails API paired with a React UI.
HuffPost React Native App
Explored feasibility of using React Native for app development, and co-architected a new app using React Native. Released as HuffPost's first React Native application for Android.
Legacy content import
Directed and wrote the tooling to execute the mass conversion of HuffPost content from a legacy CMS: ~10 million articles dating from 2006 to 2016.
Live Election Results Dashboard
Created a static app to serve live polling results for the night of the 2018 U.S. midterm elections. This was white-labeled and used across Oath's (now Verizon Media Group) news properties.
Speaking
Ads Are Evil, But I'm Worse
This presentation describes a mysterious ad which I discovered after it tried to cover its tracks a little too conspicuously. I describe how JavaScript can be used to conclusively determine if a browser's JS console is open, and then I explain how to proactively guard against the technique.
Gluing The Web And WebAssembly Together
This a technical talk that describes how to add convenience code that makes running WebAssembly easier. wasm-bindgen and emscripten generate convenient glue code automagically, and this talk goes into detail about what problems they solve, and how to solve them manually.