Stephen Coogan
Front-end Web Developer

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Stephen Coogan Front-end Web Developer

Objective

To evangelise best practices for both large and small scale websites and applications, encourage building forward-compatible websites, componentisation, cross-team mindshare of concepts, and trying to avoid supporting as much Internet Explorer as user statistics allow – for the sake of everone's sanity…

Skills

  • HTML
  • CSS
  • Sass/Scss
  • BEM Methodology
  • OOCSS
  • JavaScript/ES6
  • React
  • Redux
  • Webpack
  • Git
  • Apache
  • Express
  • Linux
  • Docker

Experience

Walmart Global Tech Senior Software Engineer Aug. 2019 - present

Currently working as part of the User-Generated Content (UGC) team responsible for the operation of the Ratings & Reviews ecosystem for Walmart.com. Striving for a community-driven, high-engagement product review experience. Dealing with 200 million customers across 27 countries, hundreds of millions of daily page views.


CarTrawler Senior Software Engineer Aug. 2016 - Aug. 2019

Striving to increase developer mindshare and knowledge of componentisation methodologies and best-practices. Encouraging cross-departmental communication to enable higher-quality deliverables and a smoother development process, while mentoring developers in code-quality and testing standards.

Next-gen Landing Pages Infrastructure, Microsite Oct. 2018 — present

Next-gen Landing Pages is an initiative to provide partner management with best-in-class tools for rapid onboarding of new partners. While the existing project requires a bespoke build per site, next-gen would instead allow for construction and content management of each page via a headless CMS and modular components.

Travel Buddy Progressive Web App

A post-booking companion with the goal of easing the stress of the car rental pick-up process. Makes use of the latest technologies to allow users to store booking vouchers offline, as well as Add to Home Screen to give a native app look and feel, all while running in the device’s browser.

Prism - Styling Framework & Design System Proprietary Project Ongoing

The Prism Styling Framework & Design System is an initiative to provide a best-in-class system to help synergise design and development functions, aiming to blur the line between when design stops and development starts and easing transition between the two, reducing friction between teams. This is accomplished by working very closely with design teams to create a standard library of known components and styles that can be called upon, at a whim, to create almost any visual representation of CarTrawler products with full confidence in their accurate representation in-browser.

In addition to this, the Framework & Design System is helping lay the groundwork for a greater push towards a wholly componentised approach providing all teams in the company with complete access to a shared component library, allowing them to mix and match from a predefined list of on-brand, fully-tested components. This approach will eventually provide incredible stability and identical core functionality, regardless of tech stack, device, or screen size.


Paddy Power Front-end Web Developer Aug. 2013 - Aug. 2016

Worked as part of the Paddy Power Sportsbook team, helping deliver a consistent and easy-to-use experience to millions of users per month by improving page performance and usability. Also helped in improving the lives and mental stability of in-house developers by refactoring HTML and CSS, as well as implementing best-practices and standards.

In-play Betting Pages Dec. 2014

Paddy Power's newest In-play Betting Pages were developed as part of an initiative to create more in-house, best-in-class, products that would provide value to the company while simultaneously reducing dependencies on third-party clients. These pages use a number of new technologies such as AngularJS and WebSockets for realtime price updates.

As part of working on the core functionality of the site, I also developed the initial project structure to allow the project to scale painlessly, as well as created an extensive Gruntfile that would handle a large number of tasks that were responsible for building the source files, committing the newly-built files to Git, and automatically versioning the project according to Semantic Versioning.

Abacus CSS Framework 2016

The Abacus CSS Framework is a powerful, modular, and lightweight CSS component library built using OOCSS and BEM notation, for use across all Paddy Power sites and products. It features a powerful mobile-first grid system, incredibly flexible components and is capable of delivering the entirety of Paddy Power's online branding and style, as well as full structure and layout support for mobile-first development in just 9KiB.

The project is a slacktime project that I created to help intertwine the Web Development and Product Design teams to get them to communicate more, and help bring consistency to Paddy Power's branding and design across our entire online portfolio.

It has given designers the ability to easily update the look and feel of all Paddy Power's online products, allowing them to confidently make changes while reducing the dependency on developers to make said changes on their behalf - freeing up valuable time for other projects.


CentralReservations.com Front-end Web Developer Sep. 2011 - Aug. 2013

Responsible for maintaining the look and feel of both the primary reservation website, and the company's own corporate site. Also responsible for maintenance of imaging and colour schemes of over 1,500 microsites created and hosted on behalf of hoteliers.

Notable tasks

  • Successfully advocated for the use of PyroCMS on several of our microsites to allow hoteliers a friendly and easy interface to update their sites. The decision to use PyroCMS was based on the need for a CMS that was not only extremely lightweight and easy for customers to use, but was quick and easy to theme for.
  • Completely redesigned and redeveloped the company's booking engine, offered to hoteliers for use on their own websites, and drastically improved UX resulting in increased conversion across many existing sites.
  • Lead the implementation of front-end frameworks and technology such as Twitter's Bootstrap which allowed allocating extra resources to back-end development.
  • Introduced the use of the LESS CSS pre-processor which decreased development time and enabled us to keep third-party libraries and code up-to-date with great ease.
  • Spearheaded the development of mobile-friendly themes for use on over 1,500 microsites which would enable customers to book rooms with incredible ease across a vast array of mobile devices.

CentralR.com Web Developer May 2008 – Mar. 2009

A direct competitor to CentralReservations.com, CentralR.com operates in a similar fashion and is responsible for over 1,000 external sites created and maintained on behalf of hoteliers.

Notable tasks

  • Worked as part of a small team for the complete redesign and redevelopment of the company's main reservation site under a very tight deadline.
  • Responsible for the imaging and copy on several of the company's external hotel websites.
  • Designed and created the company's advertising for use across the UK & Ireland with Sky Active.

Side Projects

Oscailte (Octopress Theme) 2013

Oscailte is a free (as in beer) and open-source theme, built for use with the Octopress blogging framework. Designed to be highly customisable by simply setting flags and changing config variables, it has proven to be a somewhat popular theme — allowing users to spend less time fighting with the theme and more time writing.

DesktopVersion 2013

DesktopVersion was a Reddit bot written entirely in Ruby that could scan recent Reddit submissions linking to en.m.wikipedia.org and then left a comment to that same submission with a standard link to the Wikipedia article.

Education

I'm largely self-taught when it comes to front-end web development and have acquired these skills over the past few years by following blogs and tutorials by some of the most respected individuals in the industry such as Paul Irish, Chris Coyier, David Walsh, and Harry Roberts - to name but a few.

That being said, I have finished the following course:

Certificate in Web Technologies
NCI, Dublin | 2013

  • Completed course with First Class Honours.
  • Was elected class representative. During my tyranny, I encouraged fellow classmates to collaborate and share course notes with each other via Github repositories - inspired by the theory of Collective Intelligence.

Interests

There are a lot of things that I enjoy, but out of all of them, I enjoy these the most: reading about the latest advancements in web technologies & reading in general, typography, music, fixing things most people would deem broken, playing games – board & video, and taking myself seriously at times.

I also have a strong passion for open-source technology (this CV is open-source!) and a free and open Internet, and regularly donate to the Mozilla Foundation and the EFF.