Application: Tailwind CSS - Staff Software Engineer
Dear Adam, Steve, Simon and Robin
Please let me start by introducing myself: My name is Elwin and I live in the beautiful city of Zurich in Switzerland, not far away from the mighty alps. During my studies I’ve worked at a small recruiting office, working on their public webpage as well as some internal tools for managing employees. By chance I got wind of Laravel and the encouragement to rewrite our projects with it (away from the cobbled together Drupal pages we’ve had previously). Through the Laravel community I eventually also hear about TailwindCSS and become interested in it (after repeatedly failing to write maintainable CSS).
After that gig (which lasted my whole studies), my focus shifted towards writing high performance and scalable software, both in a research and industry setting.
What do I enjoy
In recent years, my interest in Software Engineering has converged to roughly 5 topics, some of which I believe are directly relevant for Tailwind:
- Reliable & Maintainable Software: While oftentimes more intricate, I’ve found that taking the extra steps often pays of quickly. Unreliable software is just not pleasant to use for clients, but also debugging and maintaining it is oftentimes insanely costly.
- Efficient Software: Since my studies I’ve been interested in writing software that makes good use of the available resources. I don’t shy back from digging deep to uncover bottlenecks, even when reaching unfamiliar ground.
- Developer Experience: In recent years I got interested in improving developer experience when I found this to be a bottleneck in writing software. This starts in providing pleasantly to use tools, fast compilation and testing cycle as well as responsive CI pipelines.
- Computer Networking: While not necessarily directly related to this position, this area lives from specifications and RFCs, something I found quite useful in the web space as well.
- Algorithms and Scaling: While a bit questionable to put these together into the same basket, the end-goal is often-times the same: Provide efficient computations for inputs with increasing size. Some of my favourite problems are the ones that take the majority of time in solving the problem conceptually but just a few lines to implement.
Looking at example projects for this role, I’d probably be most excited about working on performance related projects as well as improvements towards developer experience (both for Tailwind developers but also “clients” of Tailwind).
Open Source Contributions
I was leading the process of open sourcing a tool at a previous company, especially in terms of technical challenges (exporting it from a monorepo). The tool itself, franz, is quite useful when interacting with Kafka clusters.
A small project of mine is table, a utility tool that pretty prints a csv as a formatted table. For a to me unknown reason, it gets around a 100 installs per month.
Another project I’ve quite enjoyed is routes, a CLI that creates a poster from Strava activity data (e.g. bike rides).
Personal
Outside of work I can often be seen in the mountains: Skitouring in the winter, hiking or biking in the summer. I’m also playing the trumpet in a Big Band, and funnily enough from time to time in the Military as well (last year, I’ve had the chance to play at the Military Tattoo in Edinburgh).
My application may be a bit surprising, given my involvement in Web Development already dates back a few years. That being said, I’ve seen a fair share of different environments, programming languages, frameworks, paradigms and communities and believe this bring additional value when tackling problems.
I’d be happy to have a chat with you and look forward for your feedback!
Cheers, Elwin