My name is Rafael and I have been building digital products for over fifteen years.

I specialize in frontend development, leveraging design systems and leading technical teams.

I am available to collaborate on a part-time basis, in a small number of projects.

Get in touch.

Throughout my years in the industry I have been exposed to all sorts of different projects with various specific needs.

From interactive video installations, to e-commerces, custom CMS solutions, mobile applications, real-time applications, interactive websites, open source project maintenance, frontend custom tooling (linting plugins, SEO automation tools, crawlers, custom performance monitoring CLIs, etc), chatbot applications, custom plugins for Figma and Sketch, application infrastructure (setting up CI/CD pipelines, integrating code health tools and monitoring into CI, setting up AWS-based applications using Terraform and Cloud Formation) and building Node.js backends.

I have also been mentoring engineers on my spare time, and ran a React course for Udacity Brazil a couple years ago, which gave me hands-on experience with training, along with speaking at technology conferences, meetups and hosting a technology podcast.

Here is what I can offer you:

• Engineering leadership, mentoring and hiring
  • 1:1 with engineers to establish and track their goals
  • Performance reviews
  • Establishing a career ladder for your engineering team
  • Job descriptions for technical roles and interview process kit (including a take-home exercise suggestion geared towards your team specific needs)
• Helping your team break down your code base into a more manageable monorepo model
• Migrating your project’s frontend to leverage micro frontends
• Improve testing coverage of your project
  • Add unit tests to bump up code coverage and increase trust
  • Add end-to-end tests to ensure the main funnels and conversion points of your application are predictable and working as expected
• Accessibility audit of your application frontend
  • Detailed list of accessibility issues getting in the way of your project having a high score
  • Full plan on how to get your application to match minimal or specific web accessibility compliance standards (such as WCAG 2.0 AA)
  • Jumping into your existing code base and refactoring your frontend to make all adjustments necessary to meet proper accessibility standards
• Building a design system for your project
  • Creating a design token layer that expresses your project’s brand identity as a shareable and common configuration object
  • A Figma UI kit built on top of a design tokens through Figma reusable symbols
  • A component library containing UI primitives built on top of design tokens, containing elementary components such as button, checkbox and radio button
  • A Storybook site containing all components available via your component library and documenting all design tokens available in your design system
  • Integration of your design system with CMS solutions such as Builder.io, Shopify or Contentful
• Developing mobile applications, static websites or single-page applications
• Performance analysis of your application frontend and a detailed plan to perfect it
• Building tools to improve code standards across your code base that can be integrated via CI or in the form of a linting rules library
• Refactoring and modernization of code nobody wants to touch
  • Good code is code that is live in production and working, but if you need to refactor either because you are migrating to a new framework, language or cloud provider, I will be there to help
• Training on web semantics, JavaScript and CSS, React, React Native and code collaboration (pull request and code review guidelines)
• Technical writing
  • I can help you write down documentation for areas of your code base are not yet documented
  • Documentation of examples on how to use your API or library
  • Building a kitchen sink demo for your component library so folks know how to use it from a practical standpoint
  • Writing down a series for your engineering blog containing a couple different articles to kick it off

Technologies and concepts I have been using the most for the past five years:

• TypeScript as programming language
• Jest for unit tests and Playwright for end-to-end tests
• React Native and React Native Web to build universal component libraries
• Storybook as a solution for living documentation and component testing
• GitHub Actions as CI/CD automation solution
• Expo as a tool for mobile application infrastructure automation
• GraphQL and Apollo (including Apollo Federation to combine multiple endpoints) to build frontend-optimized web APIs
• Lighthouse for performance and accessibility metrics and fine tuning
• Next.js as web framework
• Tamagui as universal themeable component foundation
• Figma as design tool of choice
• Turborepo as a solution to manage and build monorepos
• Custom solution for micro frontends that takes into account your infra needs and JavaScript framework of choice

Some of the clients I have collaborated with more recently are: Memberstack, Anima, Epic Games and Gateway.

For more details about my past endeavors and testimonials from clients and co-workers, check out my LinkedIn profile.

If you think you or your team could benefit from us collaborating together, let’s talk.