Hi! I’m Dean.

I’m an engineer, designer,
and team lead who makes
web stuff from scratch.


* Like this site! Take a peek at the source.

↓

I’ve been in engineering, product, and design roles for over a decade.

Scroll for some highlights.

Silicon Valley

Six years building startups in San Francisco with CS fundamentals. Studied and TA'd at Georgia Tech: Smalltalk and systems design, some ML, and a thesis that turned into an art practice.

New York

Led engineering projects with design priorities at Squarespace, Compass, and creative agencies. Client work, frontend architecture, and design systems.

Product Engineering

One of my favorite teams is still Inkling, a publishing platform backed by Sequoia with ties to Apple and Notion.

Building the Tools

Lead dev for Habitat, a cloud-based publishing suite. Our ex-Google/Apple team was committed to shared ownership and robust testing — 200k+ lines of vanilla JS from scratch. Wrote some fun docs.

Going Enterprise

Inkling found market fit as an enterprise company. I helped close a critical deal with Pearson as our product representation, pitching Habitat directly to their purchasing leadership.

Product Engineering

More recently, I drove work at Squarespace to make their CMS more flexible and unlock years of user content.

Iterative Engineering

Daily work as tech lead for our new Collections team, respon­sible for reusable content. Led animations work for our user sites before that — code and design.

Technical Product Strategy

Two for one. Identified a reduced-rewrite path to significant new revenue opportunities that would also improve our platform and dev velocity.

Research Partnerships

Built this roadmap from dozens of interviews with customers, staff engineers, designers, leadership. Advocated with prototypes and 100+ pages of docs, RFCs, and systems analyses of a 15+ year codebase.

Design Systems

While at Compass, I led work to unify 60+ separate web and native apps with a React-based design system.

React Foundations

Led our Design System team to introduce a common core of React components. Substantial planning and advocacy work as 100+ devs moved from legacy React, Angular, Backbone, and Web Components code.

Standards Process

Wrote code but also lots of time in spreadsheets, mapping shared and one-off components across our codebase. Also building trust: stakeholder interviews with devs and designers as we tried to make good first decisions.

Design and Code

My first New York job was leading creative tech at Elephant, an agency that grew out of projects at Apple.

Branding the Agency

Built and co-designed our technology as we expanded our client list from Apple: a Lottie-driven website, an interactive office, and an approach to pitching where we’d hand clients real, working software during the call (app, chatbot, website, etc).

Client Work

Led some pitch work and contracted builds: physical computing for retail flagships, data viz for consumer finance (D3), and iOS apps with image recognition for toy companies. Lots of live demos, but a little systems work, too.

I’ve also lived a bunch of lives in a bunch of places.

Art Work

Physical installations, hacked browsers, and drone choreography inspired by Pina Bausch. Exploring how we negotiate our ideas of history, intimacy, and identity as we respond to changing technology.

Performances

Theater kid, grown up and playing with tech culture in other ways: group perform­ances in SF, Zurich, Berlin, and Kosovo — all places I lived. Dance stuff in Brussels with a Trisha Brown choreographer.

Teaching

Started teaching web stuff in high school. Smalltalk TA at Georgia Tech, mentor at Hackbrite and Dev Bootcamp, and lots of coffees with people starting out in tech. Also a registered yoga teacher.

Writing

Plenty of dev blog articles, like this one. Finished my CS degree and kept studying writing at Emory, Sarah Lawrence, Leeds, and the School for Poetic Comp­utation. Wrote other things, too.

Now in New York. 🍎

Happy with hybrid and remote.

Mostly looking for lead or senior roles in web product engineering.

work@deanhunt.us



* Got a contract or PM/design role? Pitch me!

ty! 


// Coded from scratch, December 2022.
// No libraries, just view-source.
// 	* Okay, except for Lottie. :)
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} /* 🏋🏽 *