TJ VanToll

- Oh hey, I’m working here right now. Like, right now, as I write this. - We make awesome things at Blues so you should work with us, or buy our stuff, or both! - I do both developer relations stuff and front-end development stuff at Blues—and it’s pretty awesome.

- 8 years is a long time. I worked with a ton of cool people, worked on a lot of amazing projects, and traveled to a lot of incredible places. It’s hard to summarize 8 years in one text box, but here goes 🙂 - Helped to advocate the Telerik Platform, which was a mobile development platform centered around Cordova at first, and then a custom framework we created. - Led the developer relations efforts around the open-source project NativeScript. Wrote 100s of blog posts, recorded dozens of videos, and gave numerous talks on podcasts and tech events around the world. It was a blast. - Ran React Wednesday for two years, which was a weekly Twitch stream where I interviewed interesting people from around the React world. It made the pandemic slightly less awful.

- Was the first web developer hire here. - Led the front-end development of the company’s server management app. - Did some open-source work. (I was a member of the jQuery team at the time, which was really impressive to casually mention to people in 2012.) - Built a new mobile web app with Backbone and jQuery Mobile, which were brand new and cool at the time.

- Great first software job out of college. - I wrote a lot of Java and COBOL 😱 - Eventually transitioned into doing primarily web development. - Led an effort to get all of the company’s web applications to work in browsers not named Internet Explorer. I still have nightmares about this. - Led the front-end development of a new auto insurance quoting application. I was really proud of the app and then management killed it a year after its launch—fun!