Pierre Spring

Full Stack Node.js and Frontend Developer

December 2013 - Present

Freelance Node.js and Frontend Developer

Incorporate teams and help with the transition to modern web application development.

May 2011 - December 2013

Partner and Lead Frontend Developer at Nelmio

Bootstrapped a fully-remote web agency specialized on single page applications.

January 2005 - April 2011

Full Stack Web Developer at Liip

Early years - from full stack to frontend.

2000 - 2006

BSc Computer Science University of Fribourg

About Me

Hi, my name’s Pierre. I am a full stack web developer with 15 years of experience, based in Zürich, Switzerland. I have worked with a range of different languages and frameworks and ultimately fell in love with TypeScript. In my career I have acquired experience in leading teams, product development, agile methodologies, building companies, working with clients and customers.

I love to share my passion for Clean Code and Maintainable CSS. I am currently mostly fluent with the following technologies:

• TypeScript
• JavaScript
• React & Redux
• Vue
• Angular
• Jest
• Express
• GraphQL
• PostgreSQL
• SASS
• Docker

Most of all, I believe that clean and maintainable code is a side-effect of continuously evolving and adapting the development process. Simple tools like code reviews, pair programming, git flow, continuous integration, continuous deployment, and automated testing are often easy to implement and have a tremendous effect on long-term productivity of a team.

Experience

Freelance

As a freelancer, I incorporate teams and help with the transition to modern web application development.

BKW Development of a web components style guide which caters both static pages, and web applications. bkw.ch

Republik Maintain the Node.js backend of the publication tool for an independent Swiss online newspaper and helped kick-start the transition to TypeScript. I learned a lot about the tradeoffs necessary to deploy a functioning tool in a short amount of time with a small team, which aims for 100% uptime. republik.ch

SBB Worked with a team of frontend developers on the relaunch of the SBB Website over a period of 3 years. While bringing in my experience in writing maintainable JS and CSS, I learned a lot about Accessibility and Analytics on this job. sbb.ch

Neue Zürcher Zeitung & Livingdocs I joined the team that worked on a full-stack publication tool, written in Node.js and Angular. While bringing in my experience with writing single page application, I learned a lot about unit testing, continuous integration and deployment, authoring NPM libraries on this job. nzz.ch

Credit Suisse I joined the team that worked on a redesign of the website. I brought in my knowledge of maintainable CSS and modern frontend development and learned a lot about working in a big corporation. credit-suisse.ch

Nelmio AG

Together with Jordi Boggiano I bootstrapped a fully remote web agency. We specialized in single page applications, with Jordi taking the lead in backend and open source development, while I took the lead in frontend development.

Additionally I helped our clients with product development and took care of our sales, hiring, and administration. Some of the clients we worked with were:

• local.ch
• Zürcher Kantonalbank
• colibird.ch
• Unic
• Ginetta
• Swiss

Both Jordi and I spoke at many conferences during these years, which is how we met most of the talented developers we hired.

While the company quickly grew both in size and recognition, my role shifted mostly to administrative tasks. In order to focus more on development and system architecture, I gradually transitioned to freelance development, completely leaving my administrative tasks at the end of 2013.

Liip AG

Early years - from full stack to frontend.

I joined Mediagonal AG in its very early years. This company in Fribourg later merged with the Zurich based bitflux GmbH to become Liip AG.

At that time the web was booming. At Liip, we believed in the Sematic Web, embraced XHTML, were happy to see it replaced by HTML5, went from administrating servers to automated dev ops. As browsers and computers become powerful enough for serious frontend development, I started concentrating more and more on frontend. After reading Douglas Crockford's JavaScript: The Good Parts and understanding the functional nature of JavaScript while falling in love with its prototypal inheritance, my path was sealed.

My years at Liip were probably the most formative of my life. We worked crazy hours and had a tremendous amount of fun. We were constantly ahead of the curve, used clever tricks to design responsive pages before the browsers offered the tools necessary for it. Delivered standard conform pages using progressive enhancement. And when the iPhone sealed the faith of Flash, we were more than prepared to take over the single page applications market.

After 6 years at Liip, the company had grown form 5 employees to 60. I started to miss the craze of growing a small company. I left Liip to create my own agency.

Education

My time at the University of Fribourg provided me with a good theoretical foundation in computer science and gave me a toolset I still regularly find myself using.

In parallel I discovered the web, which took me by surprise. Combining the theoretical knowledge from the classes with the down-to-earth experience in the early days of the web was a fantastic experience. While most of my student colleagues pursued a masters degree, I chose to go into web development full-time. A decision I never regretted.

When I'm Not Programming

JSZurich

Together with Jordi we organized a monthly meetup for JavaScript developers. Being very passionate about JavaScript, this helped us and others keep up with its evolution.

SwissJS Conference

The next obvious step after organizing a local meetup was a national community event. We organized the SwissJS Conference in the years 2012, 2014, and 2015.

While knowledge transfer was an obvious part of the event, the main focus was to meet JS developers from all over Switzerland. The ticket prices were as affordable as CHF 25, in order not to leave anyone behind.

Organizing these conferences, I learned about the lack of diversity in our community, realized that I was probably part of this problem and how we, as a community, could mitigate these problems. To this day, this is something I personally work on.

Public Speaking

In the years 2011 - 2015 I spoke at various conferences in Europe, mostly with a focus on performance, maintainable CSS and best practices in JavaScript development.

Hobbies

The web is not everything.

Vintage Computers I recently aquired an IBM 5155 with the aim to learn about operating systems. The plan is to install Minix on this machine and write a driver for the XT IDE card.

Homelab I maintain a self-hosted homelab. It gives me the opportunity to learn about containers and linux. ZFS is my Filesystem of choice, all of this is running on an Ubuntu Server.

Family I am the father of 4 kids and spend most of my free time with my children.