Karl Westin

Frontend Developer

Drawing of Horseid Beach, Lofoten, Norway

Dear Friends

I’m looking for work as a Frontend/JS Developer, remote or on location in Gothenburg. I’m available for both contracting and employment work. I’ve been working as a frontend developer for around 10 years, building everything from offline-capable mobile apps for west Africa, over large single page web apps, to animated marketing websites. I hope I can contribute with a few years of practical experience, some problem solving and a lot of willingness to learn from others and by myself. Read some more about me here, and please don’t wait to get in touch if I can contribute to what you are building!

Software is Built Together

I believe good software is created in the cooperation between designers, programmers, project managers and users. It’s a negotiation between what makes the user productive, what solves an organizational problem and what is feasible to build within a short time frame. I’ve been lucky to work on projects where we could release in cycles of a few days to a few weeks, immediately getting feedback whether the thing we’re creating is useful. Everyone mentioned above has a role in this, and has to do their part for the project to be successful.

Offline Applications

I have several years of experience with building offline-capable Progressive Web Apps to be used under tough circumstances. Bad/non-existent network connections, users with little computer experience and often a need to get the application working fast, since they were built to support on-going health responses. This work was meaningful and interesting, and lies very close to my heart. If you are working on anything similar to this I’d be extra interested to hear from you!

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Skills

Very familiar

Quite familiar

Some things i've touched and am interested in

Team Work Skills the i believe are important

CV

2017 - Present

Field Intelligence (Abuja, Nigeria/Berlin, Germany)

Software Developer

I've been working a few years at Field Intelligence to build an offline capable logistics system for pharmaceuticals. We started out with creating the software for the large national health programs, like immunization, HIV/AIDS and malaria, moving millions of units to everything from the city of Lagos to rural Kano. Since they are up and runnning, we are adapting the software for private pharmacies, to be able to supply local communities.

The technology stack is an interesting mix, we run PouchDB in the browser to support offline operations, and then work with AWS Lambda together with ElasticSearch and Postgres to provide tracking of usage, forecasting and invoicing.


2015-2016 (+ a short stint 2017)

eHealthAfrica (Berlin, Germany)

Software Developer

A software development NGO focused on building systems to support public health, mostly in west Africa.

Here, I was mostly building Android applications with web technologies (Cordova), to create offline-ready mobile apps. Using PouchDB/CouchDB and Angular or React I created a few different mobile applications for ebola contact tracing in Liberia and Sierra Leone, an ebola vaccine experiment (STRIVE) and a project to map villages and track the african sleeping sickness in Democratic Republic of Congo. Connectivity and the distributed nature of the applications was the main challenge – how to move many megabytes of data over edge connections, and how to let multiple clients write data on for example the same patient without causing conflicts and data loss. Meanwhile I also took part in creating on a few Django-based dashboards for those projects, building admin interfaces and accompanying REST APIs.

The workflows here were mostly based on implementing wireframes and functionality. I was lucky to work with very technical designers, and often I started building a half-styled application, which they polished and then we worked on some design-critical tricky parts together.


2012-2014

ReadyForZero (Remote, San Francisco, USA)

Web Developer

A consumer financial tracking tool, to help people understand and pay down Credit Card Debt, Student Loans, as well as other types of debts and loans.

I was developing interfaces to visualize money and payments, creating automatic/manual forms to connect your bank details, make payments from within the application and to track your progress. Again, the designer I was working with was very technical, so we usually swapped UI code and took turns working on functionality, styles etc. We built the site in Backbone.js with a bunch of charts in Highcharts, talking to a backend written in Clojure.


2010-2012

Nerd Communications (Berlin, Germany)

Web Developer

An advertising agency, also developing iPhone applications.

I mainly worked on the website for one of our iPhone apps, Ben the Bodyguard. It was a pretty funny comic-book style site where you were walking down a dark street where a figure (Ben) would tell you the story about the application. It involved using some unconventional combination of media queries for proto-responsive images, and some user agent sniffing server side to make the site work on the iPhone.

This happened as the idea of responsive design started to develop, and the designer and I worked very closely together on how their Photoshop designs would scale and go from very big screens to smartphones.


2007-2010

Curt Design (Malmo, Sweden)

Graphic Designer

Small graphic design agency working for local clients.

When starting here, I worked on the print side, book designs, brochures, etc. I got more into web development because frankly, it was the type of jobs we found, and often they came together with other type of graphic design jobs.

Some code

PouchDB Sync To Anything
A small snake implementation in ClojureScript
A Minesweeper in ClojureScript
A Functional Music Player