James Gillen's Resume

As a main contributor and team lead, I design, develop and nurture a positive environment for the team I help manage. We work as a Lean Agile pod on the highest traffic areas of the site.

Recently I've been working on creative critical JavaScript solution for the homepage realizing 5x improvement in speed and over 10% reduction in bounce rate, the lowest in Cars.com history.

We use the latest features in JavaScript and transpile back to es5 with Babel. We bundle our work with Webpack and use a continuous pipeline with Jenkins and Artifactory to release on a daily basis.

I built an Alexa skill Change My Money to learn AWS Lambda and Amazon's new voice platform.

• Experience
  • Cars.com (6/6/2013 - Present) Chicago, IL
    Senior Front-end Developer
    • I deliver well tested modular JavaScript with semantic HTML and CSS;
    • Perform discovery (e.g. planning, sizing, POCs) to ensure success of my delivery team;
    • Lead design and code review sessions;
    • Coached and mentored new developers;
    • Help vet incoming talent;
    • And most importantly, I ensure the high quality output of our team's code;
    • I have learned techniques of TDD, Pair programming and Continuous Delivery at Pivotal Labs;
    • I was chosen as part of a select group to overhaul the development practice at Cars.com
  • John G. Shedd Aquarium (2/2007 - 6/6/2013) Chicago, IL
    Online Technology Manager
    • Lead Architect on all web assets including our RedDot CMS (now known as OpenText Web Solutions), intranet, and multiple public facing websites;
    • Maintain and manage both IIS and Apache web servers and third party vendors for web solutions and e-commerce;
    • Developer of front end UI and template creator for sites as well as CMS;
    • Manager of internal and external application developers and DBA;
    • Responsible for training users on our content management solutions, educating our web team on internet standards, including best practices, and emerging technologies like javascript frameworks, mobile design, HTML5 and current web security risks.
  • Equis Corporation (4/1999 - 2/2007) Chicago, IL
    Sr. Designer, Web Developer
    • Lead architect, designer and developer in Equis' first intranet site built on Macromedia's (now Adobe's) ColdFusion programming framework;
    • Developing the intranet site, while forging a strong relationship between Marketing and Information Technology, we created many dynamic applications. Some notable applications included: a custom accounting application, financial dashboards, leader-board (top 5 transactions), help desk and graphics tracking products;
    • Within my last year at Equis we converted our intranet into a Sharepoint Portal. Developing all the custom templates for the new intranet we were able to re-use, with slight modification, all of the original databases;
    • Work with internal, external clients and vendors on a daily basis to provide graphic and web solutions to foster existing and new business relationships generating new revenue. Responsible for training employees and clients by creating tutorials, FAQs, quick help guides and presentations to connect them with needed resources and multimedia solutions.
    • Other responsibilities included, but were not limited to:
      Assistant art director and designer for advertisements, brochures and direct mail;
      Photographer for company events, and scout for photo shoot locations;
      Maintain and develop new vendor relationships; Project manager on the website refresh project of 11-2006.
  • PC_Vantage (3/2000 - 12/2006) Chicago, IL
    Principal, Director of Development
    • Database and Application Development for company and all new business;
    • Responsible for internet services, web development, creative and database development;
    • Responsible for new business generation including project management and lead developer.
    • Accomplishments:
      Designed and developed an e-commerce Help Desk solution for all Microsoft Windows OS products. In a small team environment, we launched the site within 6 months without budget. In doing so we also developed a new style of media tutoring to accommodate for low bandwidth.
  • LEC LTD (6/1998 - 10/1998) Chicago, IL
    Graphic Designer
    • Designed announcement cards;
    • Oversaw all final digital production;
    • Organized and handled company portfolio;
    • Assisted in the redesign of company web site;
    • Managed production room archives.
  • Jacobs and Clevenger (6/1997 - 5/1998) Chicago, IL
    Graphic Designer
    • Managed production room and archives;
    • Responsible for typesetting on various IBM, ComEd and ADA direct mail campaigns.
• Education
  • Columbia College - Bachelor of Arts, Graphic Design (with Honors)
  • Purdue University (West Lafayette, IN) concentration Engineering and Visual Communication Design
• Skills
  • HTML5
  • CSS
  • Javascript
    • AngularJS
    • Karma (test runner) / Jasmine (testing)
    • Mocha (test runner) / Chai (testing)
  • GIT (along with GitHub and Bitbucket)