Noah Allen

I have a B.S. in Computer Science and have worked in the following positions:

Webflow

At Webflow, I work on the Delivery Loop team to empower teams to ship high-quality software fast. I maintain our CI system built with BuildKite & AWS, improve our cloud-based AWS developer environments, work with teams to improve test quality, performance, and reliability, and am implementing AI-powered testing frameworks for the modern era.

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Automattic

I joined Automattic to work on a small, fast-paced team to lay the foundations for the next-gen WordPress site editor. We used React.js, PHP, and WordPress to test new theme and site editing experiences for WordPress.com.

After some time working on the site editor, I was drawn to work more closely on DevX issues impacting our productivity. I joined a team maintaining developer infrastructure and best practices for our biggest SPAs. I worked on a broad range of DevX and DevOps issues, including CI workflow enhancements, dependency updates and maintenance, OSS package maintenance, deployment workflows, server-side performance issues, and more.

➤ Improved the production build speed of our primary web app through enhanced Docker layer caching; combined with other optimizations to reduce deployment time from 20 to 10 minutes.

➤ Led a project to improve unit test suite execution time in CI by 50% (from 6 to 3 minutes), saving 6+ hours daily across 120+ runs. Achieved this through custom parallelization of multiple Jest test suites and optimized build agent CPU usage, avoiding increased license costs.

➤ Automated complex deployment processes across multiple WordPress plugins using TeamCity build artifacts and Bash scripting, reducing deployment time from 30 minutes to 10 minutes and consolidating different deployment workflows to boost developer productivity.

➤ Resolved a long-standing Node.js server performance issue by enhancing monitoring and alerting with Logstash and Grafana, and by integrating local profiling tools. Eliminated a server timeout and reduced response times on a critical route by 200ms.

➤ Primary maintainer of wp-env, a Docker-based development environment for the Gutenberg project. Delivered key enhancements, including Xdebug integration, config mapping, and testing profiles, to streamline workflows for hundreds of open-source contributors developing new WordPress editor features. Improved startup performance from 1 minute to 3 seconds.

➤ Exercised strong written communication skills by collaborating with open-source community members to propose and implement enhancements to the WordPress editor and developer tooling.

➤ Designed NodeJS APIs for our enterprise hosting tools and worked on the daily operations and maintenance of our kubernetes-based WordPress hosting platform. This included deploying critical fixes and updates to high-scale enterprise websites, and monitoring for platform stability and performance.

➤ Developed TypeScript definitions for open-source WordPress packages and implemented comprehensive types for internal libraries and REST APIs, solving complex TypeScript problems.

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Zonder Studios

At Zonder, I was the founding engineer, and led development of our mobile app and engineering practices.

➤ Led a team of 5 engineers to develop Zonder, a cross-platform React Native mobile app, using Typescript and Firebase to provide instant geolocation-based rewards for travel and vacation.

➤ Created the git-based developer workflow for Zonder, including CI, automated deployments to iOS and Android app stores, beta builds, linting, code signing, and code review.

➤ Created an admin web app with React for teammates to manage all of our data, such as dynamic game content and users.

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Grove City College

While a student at Grove City College, I joined the IT department to develop my problem solving and software skills in the real world. I became the lead helpdesk associate over the summer after my freshman year, and was promoted to develop software to improve department organization.

➤ Designed and programmed an intuitive WPF app in C#, automating the label printing process for Helpdesk tickets, which improved workshop efficiency by providing more information to techs.

➤ Demonstrated strong communication and problem solving skills by assisting students and faculty with a wide variety of computer issues.

➤ Led a team of student interns to quickly refurbish and test hundreds of laptops over the summer, ensuring reliable re-deployment to incoming students.

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First Energy

➤ Developed an interactive dashboard with complex aggregations using QlikView and SQL, giving HR visibility into training data for 500+ employees and replacing a tedious manual workflow

➤ Worked closely with other employees to develop automated QlikView reports, which helped many teams stay up-to-date on important statistics.

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