About

Heya, I'm Eric, a software engineer from Minnesota. I have worked with many languages/libraries/technologies such as:

Some Experience

Professionally, former team member at Element (Matrix ecosystem), GitLab, Gitter, and Plaudit Design. You probably know me as the sole developer (or crypt-keeper) looking after Gitter for all of these years (that "MadLittleMods" person with the blue avatar ).

At Element, I brought our long-term goal through to completion by making Gitter fully speak native Matrix and sunset the old legacy apps. This brings long-lasting stability for the years of historical content that exists on Gitter and a ton of feature parity work to benefit the Matrix ecosystem. This move also proved out the space that an existing platform can switch to speaking Matrix for interoperable, federated communication which inspired and paved the way for Rocket.chat to do the same. This includes bringing to life and launching the Matrix Viewer which makes the Matrix ecosystem a whole lot more accessible; public rooms indexable by search engines, chat messages simply viewable by URL, removing the register/sign-in, homeserver and app choice friction, and permalinks to share. This Gitter -> Matrix journey touched almost every aspect of Matrix, including Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals, improving the frontend in Element with features like jump to date, and backend engineer work on Synapse (the canonical Matrix homeserver implementation) which included improving /messages performance by 54x (worst case 185.9s response times down to 3.4s seconds).

At GitLab (Rails based), I worked on things like the switch to native Unicode emoji and the Selenium proxy server that automatically takes screenshots for any action(like a click) so you can see what is happening in your tests. Also with plans to take those generated screenshots and visually diff your merge request from the main branch to ensure we don't introduce any UI regressions into the GitLab application itself while shipping new features or refactoring. I also looked after Gitter, a separate chat app product that GitLab acquired (I joined as part of the acquisition), shipping new features, fixing security issues, poking the infrastructure, and interacting/supporting the community.

I have a few PostCSS and gulp plugins that still live on npm. And maintained a Node.js package, usb-detection (fun native C++ platform-specific code node-gyp type package), that let you listen for any USB devices that are plugged in or removed before it was deprecated in favor of usb package which finally added this functionality years later.

In the distant past, I made themes for Simple Machines Forum(SMF) that I used to hack on when first getting into the whole web developer experience. I have three themes publicly released with over 20,000 downloads, two of which garnered the Theme of the Month award.

Other things about me

Currently learning Spanish but also spent a chunk of time on Korean. Come chat with me. 한국어를 조금 할 줄 알아요. 같이 연습합시다!

My other endeavors include some game development with Unity 3D. I released Radius, which is open source on GitHub, that serves as a reference Unity 3D project to learn or build from. I used Radius in a Game Jam and created Super Bounce, a nod to the classic Halo 2 mechanic. The most recent game I released is Traces, a top-down, pseudo-3D shooter, HTML5 browser game made in another Game Jam.

I am also interested in Hardware. I like working with the power and verstility of FPGA's. Some of my FPGA projects include this implementation of Pong or my text library and VGA simulator.

If you've been on a call with me, you've probably noticed the lit-up Gitter sign hanging in the background which I've written about and have since simplified thanks to WLED.