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Jeff Keen

Experience

Tempo Labs

Since 2014 | Founder

Provided a variety of development & design consulting services for a dozen or so clients, ranging from team augmentation, mentoring, UX design, visual design, and technical writing. Greatest hits below.

Dubbletrack

2017-Present | Solo Project / Volunteering

Designed and developed a set of user-experience focused applications that enable community & public radio stations to provide listeners with advanced features that may otherwise be out of reach. In the end I hope it eliminates pledge drives.

Every broadcast you hear on 91.7 KOOP has a DJ using dubbletrack behind it.

New York Public Radio

2016-2020 | Senior Software Engineer

Led a team in the redesign/relaunch of multiple WQXR listening experiences. Championed sane API design & best practices. Mentored junior developers.

Surgically extracted the organs of two giant monolithic apps into seven slimmer feature-focused and sharable modules. The project was a technical success, but later proved to be not a practical success, creating a tangled web of dependencies that ultimately slowed progress. Sometimes DRY is not the way.

Built the frontend audio infrastructure that powers all NYPR sites.

Assemble Systems

2015-2017 | Senior Software Designer

Led user experience and visual design improvements for their 3D modeling and architectural/construction tool. Simplified complex concepts and jargon into easily grokked interfaces.

Spiceworks

2008-2014 | Senior Software Engineer, UX Lead

Played several roles as the company grew from 25 employees to 250+, from feature work in Rails, to leading UX efforts throughout the application, to having more of a product designer/creative thinker role, often being pulled into other department meetings to help come up with new ideas.

Open Source Projects

Ember Stereo

Originally built as an open source audio player for NYPR, this is a forked, renamed, and reimagined the project for modern times.

Tracking Number

In 2010 I built a package tracker app named BoxWatch that didn't make it, but this tiny ruby gem that identifies all sorts of tracking numbers has stood the test of time.

Comma Splice

A ruby gem to correct incorrectly formatted CSVs which turned into a problem that's actually kinda interesting.

Fun Stuff

Side Action Tuesday

A weekly social group I started to regularly plug away on side projects.

latlmes.com

Keeping the rick roll alive! (And based on the traffic it is very, very, alive)

Education

Minnesota State University

1999 – 2003 | Bachelor Of Science in Electrical Engineering

Columbia University

2006 – 2008 | Computer Science, 13 graduate credits

Page Two on Jeff Keen

Other Projects

Swimtopia

2021

Ported a mobile swim-meet app from Cordova & Angular to Capacitor & Ember.

IBM with thirteen23

2021

Augmented a team of engineers building React components for IBM Watson/IoT Applications.

A Cloud Guru

2020

Augmented a dev team in order to hit a crucial launch deadline for the new Courses redesign. It was a PHP job, and turns out PHP has improved a lot in the 10 years since I used it last. I like it now.

Happy Campers

2019 | Product Designer

UX, visual design, and branding for a site that helps parents choose summer camps for their kids. They joined forces with another company before even launching, but I'm really proud of the work.

One More Cloud

2018

Wrote an intro technical blog series to Elastic Search, boiling down complex topics to a language mortals can understand.

Ping Identity

2018

Built a privacy dashboard in React to assist with new GDPR regulations

Neighborly with 201-Created

2018

Ember.js consulting through 201-Created on a financial/investment app. Helped pioneer some fastboot testing utilities for mocking server-side rendered content. Provided assistance on advanced ember topics to staff developers.

Khorus

2016

UX Audit to improve onboarding times and user retention. The changes I mapped out greatly simplified the application.

Twyla with thirteen23

2015

Built the first Twyla app for their company launch using Ember. It was super glitzy and involved a lot of cutting edge CSS and animation work.

Visa with thirteen23

2014

Prototyped options for their new Visa Checkout flow.

Ancient History

Columbia University Medical Center

2006-2008 | Data Manager/Programmer

Developed an online patient monitoring system for clinical drug trials used by doctors worldwide. This was in .NET, and .NET's idea of the web in 2006 is not my idea of a good time.

Innovative Laser Technologies

2003-2006 | Electrical/Software Engineer

Designed electrical/control systems and software to run industrial vision-assisted robotic laser welding machines. This was super cool and interesting, and taught me that I really care about usability/UX.