Garet staring off into the distance

Hello, I'm Garet McKinley

I'm a Front-end Developer based in Austin, TX who is passionate about making the web faster and more accessible.

I making things that help you make things.

Career History

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NetspendFrontend Engineer

At Netspend, I worked on a platform/framework team responsible for enabling feature teams to write better code. A few of my accomplishments from working there involve migrating our legacy build system (rush and pnpm) to a much faster monorepo bazel build system, building our React based UI framework, writing advanced docs and training materials, and working on multiple bespoke packages for things like gateways, routing, microfrontends, animations, and more. It was an incredibly fun and fulfilling experience, and I would love to work on another platform team in the future.

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Timber.ioFrontend Engineer

Built a large chunk of the React components, assisted in interface design, and helped work on the electron binary for the web client. I also released a few open source packages under Timber, including the official timber-node client for transporting logs with rich context to the Timber ingestion pipeline.

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Handshake Guru TechnologiesSenior Software Engineer

I was in charge of leading the development of client projects, from inception to completion. This was prior to me going full-time in JavaScript, so my job included working on the full stack. Our stack included PHP (Laravel), Postgres, and AngularJS. It was also my responsibility to find, interview, and onboard new developers to our team.

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Red3MediaFull Stack Web Developer

Red3Media is a full service marketing agency, so my day to day work involved everything from building WordPress sites to creating designs for print and managing social media accounts. I also had the opportunity to learn about mobile app development while I built iOS apps, like the flybot.com domain search.

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CardWeb.com, Inc.Software Engineer

CardWeb.com was a portal and newsletter for financial news that had been around since the 80s. I helped work on the first major redesign in over 20 years. It was a massive 3 year project that involved building a custom PHP MVC framework, setting up a PostgreSQL database, and designing a new subscriber website. After getting the portal built, I worked closely with companies like Discover, Visa, and American Express to help implement our new API endpoints into their in-house employee portals.

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mediachickenOwner

Mediachicken is a software development alias I've used for 10 years. The most successful product was a code editor named Syntra Small. It was initially released between 2016-2017; getting over 200,000 total downloads, featured on Product Hunt, and consistently ranked in the top 10 developers tools on the Mac App Store. Unfortunately, I was unable to continue supporting the application for free, as I got busy with other things in my career. If I could go back and re-do it, I would have attempted to use a patreon-like funding model, since there was a strong cult-like following for my incredibly minimal code editor.

About Me

Professional Skills

When it comes to front-end work, I'm comfortable working with ES6, TypeScript, webpack, rollup, bazel, babel, react, react-router, redux, redux-saga, styled-components, emotion, Gatsby, Firebase, Auth0, and Stripe.

With non-front-end work, I have past experience working with Node.js, express, electron, PostgreSQL, and Heroku.

Open Source

  • hedron: React flexbox grid system · creator/maintainer · ★ 859
  • timber-node: Great Node logging made easy · creator · ★ 59
  • styled-components: Visual primitives for the component age · syntaxer · ★ 34k

Are you interested in working with me? I'm currently available for both full-time and contract work. Location is not an issue as I'm able to work remote or relocate for the right opportunity.

Get in Touch