Hello! My name is

Derek Misler


Software Engineer & Occasional Designer

I am a software engineer living in Brooklyn, NY with a design background and 15+ years of experience building exceptional, high-quality websites and applications.

Me


I have a diverse education, both traditional and self-driven, of many different web and app development languages for desktop and mobile. I also have a design background, tons of UI/UX experience, and a surprisingly large knowledge of typography (seriously, let's talk about it). I think all developers should study design, and I believe having this well-rounded education makes me a stronger engineer.

Tools that I use

  • Adobe CS
  • Aurelia
  • CI/CD
  • CSS-in-JS
  • CSS3
  • ES6/7
  • Git/Github
  • HTML5
  • LESS/Sass
  • Node.js
  • React Native
  • React/Redux
  • TypeScript
  • AWS
  • Angular
  • DevOps
  • Django/Python
  • Firebase
  • PHP
  • Ruby/Rails
  • Go

Experience


Cadre
2020Present
New York, New York
Transfix, Inc.
20162020
New York, New York
Asheville Convention & Visitors Bureau
20112016
Asheville, North Carolina
Houser Shoes, Inc.
20102011
Fletcher, North Carolina
Freelance
2009Present
Asheville, North Carolina
Precision Printing
20072009
Boone, North Carolina
The Appalachian Newspaper
20062008
Boone, North Carolina
Appalachian State University
20052009
Boone, North Carolina

Cadre


Senior Software Engineer


Full-time
2020Present
New York, New York
Link

  • Refactored and combined a decoupled SPA and third-party marketing site into a Django/React web app.
  • Migrated fragmented codebases to a monorepo.
  • Developed a custom server rendering configuration for our marketing site with Webpack, React, and new Node service.
  • Technical lead and developer of our internal component/design pattern library.
  • Contributed to the open-source component library that inspired our own component library (Base Web).
  • Lead/mentored teams of full-stack engineers across multiple projects, using both Agile and Shape Up methodologies.

Transfix, Inc.


Staff Software Engineer


Full-time
20162020
New York, New York
Link

  • First front-end engineer
  • Rebuilt our Android and iOS apps using React Native.
  • Refactored web app from Rails, to Aurelia (a terrific JS framework), and finally landing on React/Redux.
  • Refactored our public site from Wordpress to Jade, a great (but extinct) static site templating language, and then eventually to 11ty.js.
  • Developed an internal library for creating web (React/Redux) apps, mobile (React Native) apps, and shared modules (NPM).
  • Brand-new CI/CD pipeline (CircleCI).
  • Created standards for networking configurations, CSS and JS syntax linting, and automated testing.
  • Developed our web networking standards, using AWS tools, including all of our deployment configurations, client-side security, and multi-region failover.
  • Technical lead on the creation of our internal component/design pattern library.
  • Grew a team of cross-functional engineers and designers to continue the front-end and mobile work.

Asheville Convention & Visitors Bureau


Web Manager& Developer& Photographer


Full-time
20112016
Asheville, North Carolina
Link

  • Lead and primary developer of our entire web presence.
  • Created our first mobile site and responsive blog theme within a .NET-backed codebase.
  • Redesigned and refactored our marketing site twice, first with Coldfusion and later with Node/MongoDB on the back-end and a custom JS templating language, Goatee, on the front-end.
  • Oversaw design aspects of all print- and web-related assets for our various marketing campaigns.
  • Primary data analyst for all marketing campaigns, including capturing and segmenting demographic data to drive future campaigns.
  • Lead developer and designer of two long-form, media-rich, highly interactive, award-winning web applications with our Node back-end and AngularJS front-end.

Houser Shoes, Inc.


Developer& Designer& Photographer


Full-time
20102011
Fletcher, North Carolina
Link

During my time at Houser Shoes, I was part of a 3 person team that redesigned their e-commerce website. We also created a custom CMS based on Magento, which utilized primarily PHP and MySQL and was tied to their inventory and accounting systems. Photography is a part of my design background, so I was also the lead product photographer. Many hours were spent taking and editing and uploading photos of shoes. Just so many shoes. I was also in charge of the email marketing program, including all of the design and implementation of each campaign, as well as the analysis of the results after each campaign.

Freelance


Developer& Designer& Photographer


Freelance
2009Present
Asheville, North Carolina

A lot of branding at first, but eventually full-time web development. Mostly Shopify, SquareSpace, or Wordpress, but I recently had a chance to work on a custom Go-backed (Buffalo) UI/component library.

Precision Printing


Designer& Printer


Part-time
20072009
Boone, North Carolina

Though this isn't web-related, I still think my experience working in a print shop can be seen in my work as a developer. When a job consists of tens of thousands of prints, the whole process requires an extremely detail-oriented approach, efficiency, and communication among all members of the team to ensure we weren't making mistakes that would cost us a lot of time/paper/ink/money to fix.

The Appalachian Newspaper


Designer& Developer& Photographer


Part-time
20062008
Boone, North Carolina
Link

I worked with an intern to establish an online presence for The Appalachian newspaper, while still maintaining my role as the lead graphic designer.

Appalachian State University


Graphic Design


BFA
20052009
Boone, North Carolina

I chose to study graphic design in an arts department. I already had a grasp on front-end web development techniques and continued to study them during this time, but the curriculum path I chose focused on web design while also teaching color theory, typography, and layout design in a group setting. Outside of designing for the web, we also had the opportunity to learn Flash/Actionscript game development.