In this Developer Spotlight, we sat down with Devin Otway, a Software Engineer in San Francisco who currently works as a frontend engineer at . Devin recently launched a blog called built using Cosmic JS. Check him out on or , and enjoy the Q/A. Cosmic JS Postmates Hacking Depression Twitter LinkedIn _TroutZen has 43 repositories available. Follow their code on GitHub._github.com TroutZen (Devin Otway) I have been building software for about 5 years, but got into frontend development 3 years ago. Coding was an accidental passion. In graduate school for environmental engineering, I got my first taste developing dynamic models in matlab and found the development process so much fun. I then started learning and on my own and would find myself working into the morning on fun little projects when I should have been looking for jobs after finishing grad school. I knew I had found my passion. It tickled both the creative and analytical sides of my brain. How long have you been building software? Python JavaScript I come from more of a JS background, so I am a bit biased towards those language options. Right now it is , and any lightweight db that fits my project needs. I have also been playing around with Golang recently. I love its simplicity and expressiveness and have plans to rewrite my blog’s web server using it. What is your preferred development stack? React Node.js Well, two recent projects come to mind. First is , which is the blog I just finished building (now the article writing starts!). I built this project using React, Node/Express, and as the cms/backend. Aside from being an extremely fun project it’s very meaningful to me on a personal level. What past projects are you most proud of and why? www.hackingdepression.com Cosmic JS Depression affects 6.7% of adults (including me!) and is the leading cause of disability among people ages 15–44 and most people don’t like to talk about it. But in many ways it’s no different than other health issues like diabetes. It has causes and conditions and as a result there are things that you can do that give you an edge over the illness and things that you can do that make it worse. It’s this edge between what helps and what doesn’t that I hope to discuss and quantify on my blog. Secondly, I currently work as a frontend engineer at Postmates. We are in the process of wrapping up a huge rewrite of our web client. Rebuilding something from the ground up with a company that already has a large user base has been an amazing opportunity. From performance, to scalability, to seo, we have to consider it all. Also, everyday I get to work with insanely talented engineers, designers, and leaders to build a world class experience for our customers. I am very proud of the work we are doing. Well in terms of my side projects, is the first that I have put in front of users. My process was really driven by my own desire to 1) play with new technologies and 2) do something that would help me solve a challenge/problem that I was experiencing. You could say that it was quite selfish! I wanted to learn, grow, and become healthier! Those were easy motivators to align with. In terms of purpose, I expect that to evolve. Right now I am focused on it serving me first, and hopefully the more that happens, the more it can serve my future readers. Talk a little bit more about your process for building apps — who’s using them? What purpose do they serve? Hacking Depression On the language side, Golang. More broadly speaking, I am interested in learning more about cloud based service architectures and have plans to build some small services to support my blog and help me do things like quantify mood in relation to activities (exercise, diet, etc). More immediately, however, CSS-in-JS has been a client side technology that I feel has revolutionized my development. Giving CSS easy access to your JS context is a game changer! What are some technologies you are excited about that you are using today, or want to learn more about? To learn how you can contribute Apps, Articles and Extensions to the , contact us at . Cosmic JS Community build@cosmicjs.com

Twitter

Deploy a React News App in 3 Steps

Developer Spotlight: Jazib Sawar

Follow me on Twitter

Read My Stories

Too Long; Didn't Read

Make resilience your competitive advantage

Dev Spotlight: Devin Otway w/ Postmates

About Author

Comments

TOPICS

THIS ARTICLE WAS FEATURED IN

Related Stories

Untitled Story

How Virtual Socializing Saved My Mental Health

The Noonification: Top 10 CSS Performance Tips (11/14/2022)

100 Stories To Learn About Html5

10 Things You Probably Didn’t Know about Sass

10 Reasons To Use TailwindCSS In Your Next Project

How Virtual Socializing Saved My Mental Health

The Noonification: Top 10 CSS Performance Tips (11/14/2022)

100 Stories To Learn About Html5

10 Things You Probably Didn’t Know about Sass

10 Reasons To Use TailwindCSS In Your Next Project

Light-Mode

Classic

Newspaper

Dark-Mode

Neon Noir

Minty

HN StartUps