Farzad Yousefzadeh
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Farzad Yousefzadeh

farskid@gmail.com
Helisnki, Finland

Public technical speaker.
Professional mentor on Mentorcruise.com

Find me on Farzadyz.com / Twitter / GitHub / Stackoverflow / Linkedin / Medium

Main focuses

UI engineering, DX and tooling, problem solving


Professional Experiences

Lead Engineer at Stately.ai

June 2021 - Current

Full stack, focused on frontend and developer experience
Topics I can expand on: Studio architecture, Studio canvas implementation, VS Code extension architecture, AST extraction, Lint diagrams and graphical data structures, Studio rendering performance strategies, Stately code editor (Monaco, TS lang server and web workers, compile in browser), test, code and documentation generation based on logical graphs, integrating AI (LLM output) with graphical data structures

  • Lead engineer of Stately Studio, a platform and a visual builder for application logic, workflows and AI agents. Complex UI: canvas, SVG, accessible diagram, contextual interactions, embedded application. React, TypeScript, Next.js, XState, tRPC, Chakra UI
  • Core contributor of Stately VS Code extension. Stately Studio embedded in webview, bidirectional codegen and diagram generation, event base architecture
  • Core contributor of Stately code extractor (extract arbitrary JS/TS into graphical data structure), Stately Typegen (TS type generation) and Stately CLI (code generation). Babal and TypeScript AST, Recast, ESLint integration, VS Code integraion
  • Maintainer of Stately component library. React, TypeScript, Storybook
  • Core contributor of other Stately open source libraries: XState, Code extractor, Actor visualizer, Actor inspector

Lead Engineer at Epic Games

Nov 2019 - Nov 2021

Full stack, focused on frontend and developer experience
Topics I can expand on: Testing, Automated tooling, UI engineering

  • Lead engineer of Epic game services under Epic online services (Tech lead and Team lead (70%+30% cap) of a team of 45, horizontal structure). React, Next.js, TypeScript, Nest.js, Storybook, Vitest, PlayWright
  • Maintainer of Epic UI, Epic’s in-house component library. React, Vitest, Axe, Storybook
  • Maintainer of Epic’s engineering excellence tooling: Danger.js plugins, Markdown renderers of legal documents, Query monster (An early prototype of an idea similar to React Query)
  • Lead engineer of Epic’s internal test framework project (1 year span): Testing library, Jest, PlayWright
  • Drove the feature lifecycle initiative with the purpose of standardizing the lifecycle of a feature from the ideation stage to the delivery and maintenance stage, optimizing for documentation/edge case exposure early on/cross team syncing

Senior Software engineer at Futurice

Nov 2018 - Nov 2019

Full stack, focused on frontend

  • Built mobile payment solutions for Smartum Oy, a payment solutions company in Finland. React Native, TypeScript, Redux, Redux observable, RxJS
  • Lead engineer of a team of 10 to rebuild 2 of the most popular news delivery platforms, Ilta-Sanomat and Helsingin Sanomat, (with the scale of about 5 million unique visitors per day) in Finland. React, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, Next.js, Storybook
  • Built a recording studio management system for Supercell, a gaming company in Finland. React, TypeScript, Next.js, Express.js, Websockets, XState

Senior Web Engineer at Smarp

May 2018 - Nov 2018

Frontend focused

  • Software engineer of a social network acting as the knowledge hub local to enterprises. React, Angular.js, TypeScript, Node.js, Jest, Enzyme
  • Created the web API Client library on top of Smarp’s core API for central API data models, schema based data validation, data transformation and Testability
  • Helped drive the new localization initiative across web and mobile products
  • Planned the new design system initiative, working closely with the Design and the UX team
  • Project manager of the Engineering blog

[CONTRACT] Consultant at Beeptunes

Oct 2017 - May 2018

Frontend focused
Topics I can expand on: Audio streaming on client side, Audio extraction and fade effects using the Audio context API, Audio caching strategies, User event hijacking for autoplay on Safari, Shared React across web and mobile

  • Lead frontend developer of a music streaming product (Similar to Spotify). Web desktop and PWA, React, CRA, Redux, Jest, Enzyme, Web audio API, cross browser PWA

Senior Frontend Engineer at Talos Digital

Jul 2017 - May 2018

  • Frontend engineer of the US and Mexican based company’s online digital service for managing the Real Estate properties industry including legal access roles, legal document management, and legal process audit. Angular.js, Phantom.js, Karma, Jasmine
  • Frontend engineer of Passenger1 flight and accommodation booking system. React, Redux, Firebase, Jest, and Enzyme

Frontend Engineer and ScrumMaster at PersianGig

Sep 2016 - Sep 2017

  • Reworked multiple B2C and B2B cloud services (cloud storage, cloud-ware) from Dojo Toolkit to React and Redux
  • Because of better UX, being responsive for mobile users and increase in performance, our customers grew up to 1 million and 450 thousand (45% growth)
  • Upgraded a direct HTTP upload service to a Node.js, concurrent, chunk enabled uploader
  • Since the service is more reliable and supports link resumes, drag and drop and folder upload, our upload instances grew up to almost 20,000 instances per day and decreased the number of tickets complaining about failed uploads, hence caused a better situation for our customer support team (logs indicate a 60% growth in upload usage)
  • Add testing to projects up to a reasonable code coverage to increase consistency and avoid common mistakes. Before that, the codebase didn’t have any
  • Introduced Git Flow to the dev team that decreased the number of conflicts and increased development speed on the codebase
  • Gathered a small team of developers to run daily workshops on tech topics such as CI, DevOps, etc to make sure everybody learns as a team.
  • Mentored a junior frontend developer through a solid educational program (which I designed) and prepared them for team projects
  • Enhanced the CI pipeline to cache none-updated assets that decreased the frontend build duration up to 50%
  • Integrated upload interface with the native camera to increase UX
  • Designed and developed an embedding system for cloud-based files
  • Came up with an ACL system on projects that helped the company to reuse code base and extend its business model from B2C to B2B that eventually led to a 200,000 Euros worth contract with the main telecommunication service in Iran called Irancell
  • Reworked file preview/download service to Node.js server-side rendered pages
  • Member of the hiring processs

Web Developer at Bertina Co.

Dec 2014 - Sep 2016

  • Developed Employees Portal using AngularJS, a service to manage employees, request for vacatons, etc
  • Developed Minisite, a service to provide minimal, responsive personal portals with various themes and live editing using AngularJS, jQuery, and SCSS
  • Developed Chia, an Android application with a gamification approach to learning the English Language, including different levels, payments, live competitions using jQuery, Cordova, Socket.io and Node.js
  • Developed Hamkalam, an IM application for Android devices providing an anonymous chat service to the public using AngularJS, Node.jS, and MySQL
  • Developed CartoonLand, an Android application providing cartoons for kids, streaming online videos with multiple qualities, download manager to cache downloaded videos, user management, IAB for payments using jQuery, Cordova, PHP, MySQL
  • Developed multiple enterprises and personal responsive websites using Wordpress, jQuery, AngularJS

Junior web development freelancing

Aug 2011 - Dec 2014


Main Tech

HTML , CSS , JavaScript/TypeScript , React , React Native , Next.js , Node.js , Svelte , Rest APIs , GraphQL , tRPC , Serverless , Redux , XState , Cloud (AWS mostly) , CI/CD , Firebase/Supabase , Testing (Cypress, PlayWright, Testing library, Jest) , SCSS/Styled components/Tailwind/Chakra UI/Radix UI , Build system and bundlers

Mobile Development

React Native (Android and iOS), Cordova (Ionic & Phonegap)

Desktop

A few experiences with Electron.js

Databases

MySQL , PostgreSQL , DynamoDB

Others

I excell at: problem solving, communication, scope breakdown and prioritization
I’ve worked as: product engineer, consultant, DX engineer, open source contributor, mentor, individual contributor and tech lead
I’ve worked in various software industries: Education, Music, Fintech, Gaming, Cloud and hosting, Diagramming, low-code and AI


Education

  • BSc in Aerospace Engineering, Sharif University of Technology in Tehran
  • Python programming, Duke University

Public speaking (conferences, meetups, podcasts, YT shows, books)

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