Culture of Business, or a Culture of Builders?
A reflection on Culture from my time as a Midwestern engineer in Silicon Valley.
I'm Clint Andrew Hall.
About Me
I Live for Experiences
I craft them for desktop and mobile browsers, professionally and in my spare time. I'm incredibly fortunate that my passion became my career.
I pursue them, too. I enjoy conferences like SxSW, gatherings like TED and TEDx, and hackathons like Startup Weekend. I love to build with Lego. I made my own desk. I tinker with hardware and VR. If I'm not traveling the world with my wife, Olivia, you might find me onstage in community theatre, or telling a story at The Moth. We have an adorable dog named Shandy.
I currently work on Kibana at Elastic, from my home in Kansas City, MO.
In the past, I've worked for Facebook, Cerner, Sprint and Accenture, and lived in New York, Vancouver and San Francisco. So far we've visited 40 countries, (and counting).
About My Work
I'm a User Interface Engineer and Web Evangelist. I work to make the web beautiful, both on its surface and beneath.
I'm a demonstrated expert in HTML, CSS and JavaScript, React/Flux/Relay, and more. I specialize in techniques promoting web agnostics, semantics, and accessibility. I'm comfortable with varying levels of skill in any web stack, having written and maintained code in JS, PHP, Java and Ruby-on-Rails. I currently prefer Node+React or React Native for most of my projects.
I'm a regular consumer and occasional contributor to open source projects and client APIs. If I have a suggestion for a website or application, I prefer to demonstrate the idea using an API rather than just describe it-- Code Wins Arguments.
I look for opportunities where I can make strong, direct and meaningful contributions to a team, to users and to the web. I'm comfortable functioning as both designer and engineer, advising on both the technical and aesthetic. I'm affable and good-natured, yet results-driven and competitive. I have extensive experience working remotely, particularly during my time at Facebook.
About My Code
Portfolio
Explore My Projects
Here are a few of the things I've worked on in my spare time.
My Event Wall is an open-source art installation used to project photos uploaded to a Facebook Event in real time.View Details
My TEDx talk detailing an attempt to redefine how people perceive technology.View Details
Guess Friends
Guess Friends was a website a few friends and I wrote for the first Node Knockout.View Details
A method of flexing semantic HTML based on the immutable properties of the device before code is even downloaded.View Details
Career
Read About My Experience
These are a few roles I've held recently.
October 2018 — Present
Elastic
Principal Software Engineer
I most recently accepted an offer to work at Elastic on their Kibana product, specifically Canvas.
April 2015 — June 2018
Facebook NYC
User Interface Engineer
When I first moved to the NYC Facebook office, I joined the Composer team for a "hack-a-quarter", converting the Composer to React, and then worked on the Share Dialog.
Eventually Events found themselves with a large number of React and Relay projects, so I rejoined my former team remotely. I built the new Events Dashboard and Permalink, and implemented many "under the hood" improvements.
August 2013 — April 2015
Facebook Vancouver
User Interface Engineer
In 2013 I joined the Vancouver office with an amazing cadre of engineers from all over the world. With a Canadian fiance, it made sense for me to bring Facebook experience (and culture) to a group of "n00bs".
While there, I worked on the Protect and Care team developing a new Messaging Inbox built in React. I also implemented the Open Graph Share dialog for FB Platform in XHP.
January 2012 — August 2013
Facebook HQ
User Interface Engineer
I joined Facebook in 2012 as a User Interface Engineer (UIE) on the Mobile Core Web team. I then joined the Accessibility team to help make Facebook more useful to everyone on the web.
After several hackathons involving Events, I joined the team full time to rewrite the web experiences on both the mobile and main website.
Afterwards, I spent some time with the Platform team, reworking a number of different web flows, like OAuth, and embeddable components like Share, Hashtags and Topics.
What People Say
I've worked with some remarkable people.
Medium
My Drips to The Firehose.
Sometimes I like to post notes or thoughts. Opinions are always my own.
Neither Sorcerers nor Alchemists
Notes from my TEDx Audition: Rethinking the "magic" of software and how it works.
Neither Sorcery nor Alchemy
Can we redefine how people perceive technology?