Blake Winton

Driven by a desire to improve the lives of my co-workers as well as end users, I'm an inquisitive problem-solver with experience developing software on backend, frontend, and mobile platforms. My interest in new technologies and experience in management allow me to fluidly shift roles to fulfill the needs of the company.

• Designed and drove a project to build activities out of reusable components, enabling the team to hit tight deadlines for new functionality while reducing special cases in the code.
• Built tools to create and localize content, identify inconsistencies in configuration, and debug problems, leading to a lower volume and quicker turnaround time on incidents.
• Worked with other managers to implement process improvements, lowering our support burden, and answering other teams’ questions quicker.
• Identified areas of growth, provided opportunities, and got promotions for multiple people at multiple levels.

• Grew a team from 6 to 10 employees through hiring and internal transfers.
• Oversaw multiple projects spanning 2 to 3 teams and as many as 20 people, such as:
  • A new UI for printing web pages, solving many long-standing bugs and adding print-preview across all platforms.
  • A refresh of the frontend UI that increased adoption.
• Prioritized Firefox enhancements based on impact, assigned people to them, and ensured they were completed on schedule.
• Built tools to track development progress against the plan and highlight gaps in resourcing so that we could hit the timeline.

• Built up a 3-member team to develop prototypes and internal tools, fix polish bugs, and design the Developer Tools.
• Successfully advocated for more resources for the projects we were working on, leading to faster development.
• Supported the growth of team members, graduating them to other teams when they outgrew the scope of the UX engineering team.

• Created interactive prototypes to let designers see how their designs worked in daily use, and to allow us to put them in front of users for user testing and validation.
• Fixed many polish bugs to bring the front-end closer in line with the design spec and add consistency across the application.
• Wrote internal tools and created a Design System site to help the designers implement and communicate their designs, and to help developers more easily code things that matched the design.

• Fixed bugs and implemented new features for Thunderbird 3, Mozilla’s email client.
• Oversaw students doing the same, as a path to get more employees and contributors.
• Worked on a web-based front-end for a database of ISP configuration settings.
• Managed a team of 1 full-time employee and 3 contractors.

• Fixed bugs and implemented new features for Thunderbird 3.0, Mozilla’s email client.
• Oversaw students working on a database of ISP configuration settings.

• Designed and implemented 2 iPhone applications.
• Finished release of Churchill Downs Mobile Application.
• Initiated code review and led meetings for the open source Basie Project.
• Researched bugs and suggested and implemented fixes for clients.
• Wrote an invoice generator using JQuery, CouchDB, and BlueprintCSS.