Bret Hudson

Software Developer

Recent Work Experience

November 2021 - October 2023

Vercel  •  Senior Software Engineer, Internal DX

  • Tech stack included JavaScript, TypeScript, Next.js, Kubernetes, and Amazon AWS.
  • Interviewed dozens of engineers, mentored our new hires, and helped shape the front-end engineering culture
  • Initial work included translating marketing pages from Figma to code, populating content from Contentful and other CMS tools
  • Improved testing speeds by migrating our Cypress test suite to Playwright, fixing a handful of flaky tests along the way
  • To simplify the DX of working at Vercel, I was a part of an initiative to consolidate our front-end and back-end repositories into a single monorepo
  • Wrote lots of GitHub Actions tooling to detect broken links, assign reviewers based on PR contents, and
April 2019 - September 2021

Manticore Games  •  Senior Software Engineer, Full-Stack Web

  • Led a small team of web engineers to develop coregames.com using React, Next.js, and Redux.
  • Refactored the entire codebase for React 16.8 (the introduction of React Hooks) in parallel with feature development, and later ported to Next.js for server-side rendering.
  • Mentored junior engineers and provided code reviews on nearly everything that went into the website codebase, to ensure consistency, help grow engineers’ skill sets and knowledge of the codebase, and identify tech debt items to be fixed.
  • Worked with and developed features in parallel with a dedicated backend team (C#/ASP.NET).
  • Helped debug production and deploy issues related to internal server errors, inconsistencies between local and production environments, Docker/Kubernetes, and our internal routing/authentication system.
  • Implemented admin tools, code generation scripts, utility methods, a Zendesk-powered reporting system, and frequently audited the codebase to improve DX and speed up development time on new features.
  • Identified and presented solutions for weak points in UI/UX, interactions between teams, and customer service tools.
  • Provided feedback on and helped design features to ensure we didn’t paint ourselves into a corner or accrue unnecessary technical or product debt.
  • Recognized nearly all the engineers around me had more experience and made sure to learn as much as I could from them