Erik Pukinskis Portolio
I love software, especially the web. I am always trying to learn how to write software that stabilizes over time, and is amenable to modification. And balancing that against the need to get features out the door. My degree in Computer Science and masters in Interaction Design gives me a unique ability to manage tradeoffs between design and engineering.
I am currently based in Telluride, CO and interviewing for remote positions. Get in touch via email, browse my open source contributions on Github, and demos on CodePen.
Shortcut
Shortcut wanted to transition from a legacy SPA built on bespoke templating and MVC tools to a new, modern data layer. While Apollo and GraphQL are powerful tools that solve many problems, many issues from pagination to optimistic UI, multiplayer synchronization, and query aggregation are extremely tricky to design into an architecture. I helped drive conversations across teams and disciplines so that we could search a big requirements and solution space for the architecture and tools that would meet our needs long term.
Pathpoint
Pathpoint was a young company with a modern technical foundation, but a codebase lacking in discipline. While delivering features at a breakneck pace I helped refine best practices from GraphQL and TypeScript to Storybook and CSS. I dramatically simplified our component library, getting close to the holy grail of pages built entirely from Design System components.
SproutRobot
SproutRobot was a substantial Rails app that helped people plan a garden, sent personalized planting calendar emails, generated custom instructional images. Extensive design research and user testing was done to ensure that beginners could be successful in the garden.
EZJS
Since grad school I have been interested in programming interfaces for non-professionals. EZJS is a side project I have been working on, to try to design both a set of APIs and a web-based IDE that conspire to provide an interface that would let construction workers fork their employer. I am typically a big proponent of user centered design, but this project was mostly an exercise in simply reducing, reducing, reducing complexity.
Good Eggs
Good Eggs is a rapidly evolving grocery delivery service. My focus there was taking multiple different in progress front end architectures and and moving them towards a more unified codebase, as well as working with designers to move towards reusable components, rather than a large volume of one-off visual styles.
402 Receipts Standard
This was a small freelance job to take an unstyled Jekyll site and make it look relatively modern, without introducing too much complexity in the code. I focused on adding some visual flair without changing the markup.