Senior Software Engineer at Vanta
I work on frontend observability, deployment engineering, and the platform and frameworks that web apps are built on.
Most of my time goes into the platform side of frontend work. When the build is slow or a workflow makes people wait, that's mine to fix. So are the team-wide problems that don't have an obvious owner.
Really it's about making other people faster. The work is unglamorous, and the better I do it the less anyone notices, but it's what decides how quickly everyone around me can ship.
Advent of Code 2022, Day 1, solved entirely inside TypeScript's type system. No runtime code at all: the puzzle input goes into a type alias, the compiler does the arithmetic, and the answer shows up in a hover tooltip.
Node's util.format() is typed as (format: string, ...args: any[]) which lets all kinds of mistakes through. Here we build a type-safe version from scratch using generics and template literal types.
How to build a virtual scrolling Vue component from scratch. Starts with fixed-size items, then tackles dynamic sizing, accessibility gotchas, and what you actually need to think about before shipping it.
There are two dogs. Leo is a seven-year-old German Shepherd who treats every waking minute as playtime. Timber is an eighteen-month-old hound mix we adopted on a whim at a brewery, which tells you most of what you need to know about us. He mainly cuddles, and he has been going to training classes.
My fiancée and I play a lot of board games, mostly Star Realms, with a lot of Allplay titles in the rotation lately. Breweries are the other constant: local spots when we're home, and the first thing we look up when we travel. A trip can be planned around it, and usually is.
I have been brewing all-grain since 2022. Lately that means water profiles, and I am writing a tool that works out how much of each salt to add to hit the target chemistry for a given style.
Cooking has turned into a lunch break habit. I find a recipe online, go get the ingredients, and make it that night. The rest is meat: steak, and a lot of smoked pork, chicken, and salmon.
Three years into teaching myself piano. The method is to find something on YouTube that sounds good, buy the sheet music, and work through it. Right now that is most of the Lion King soundtrack.
Got a brewery recommendation? Want to argue about TypeScript? Reach me at me@brianesimon.com, or on LinkedIn. Code is on GitHub.