image of me

Josh Magness

Full Stack Developer

UX Designer

Front End Enthusiast

Accessibility Promoter

Occasional Project Manager

Freelance Graphic Designer

Lover Of Bulldogs

Fan Of Guy Ritchie Movies

Tech Hobbyist

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Work Experience

The University of Maryland College Park

The University of Maryland is one of the nation’s preeminent higher educational institutions. Their research and computer science programs ranks among the highest institutions in the world.

Chief Digital Officer

October 2021 - Present

I am responsible for the University's digital roadmap. The roadmap is a two-year scoping document with a five-year vision. Major initiatives for the next year include:

  • Creating new web applications for umd.edu and admissions.
  • Creating the first UMD design system.
  • Fearlessly Forward digital campaign.
  • Integrating APIs for campus calendars and news feeds throughout the University.
  • Cultivated a culture of accountability through quarterly team objectives for management and individuals.
  • Manage the project lifecycle for all new digital properties.
  • Direct and track measures of success for the engineering team. Measurements include:
    • Uptime of 99.98%
    • Page loading performance testing and optimization.
    • Database query performance and optimization.
    • Server security (pin) and performance (load) testing.
    • Bug tracking.
    • Peer code reviews.
    • 508 compliance reviews.
  • Manage the design system and coordinate digital brand requirements with campus partners and vendors.
  • Conduct analytics audits for digital campaigns.
  • Coordinate with project managers for scoping, requirements, and budgeting. Conducted weekly sprint meetings for all team members.
  • Ambassador for engineering best practices for all colleges and schools, and campus offices.
  • Facilitate vendor contracts and scopes of work.
  • Coordinated the release of digital projects with multiple teams, vendors, and stakeholders.

Director of Front-End Development

June 2020 - October 2021
  • Led the accessibility compliance initiative with processes for automated reviews, training, and development updates.
  • Led the engineering team with multiple successful project launches. Projects include:
    • Web applications for aggregating University news and policies.
    • Web components for uniformed digital presence.
    • Digital campaigns such as fearless ideas and quantum.
  • Led workshops for best practices in front-end code patterns, user-centric design, and accessibility compliance.
  • Created accessibility standards for campus partners and third-party vendors.
  • Coordinated with vendors for project requirements and deliverables.

Under Armour Baltimore

The University of Maryland is one of the nation's preeminent higher educational institutions. Their research program ranks among the highest institutions in the world, and the computer science program is steadily rising to one of the nation's finest. The University's tech stack differs per unit, but our default stack is PHP and Javascript.

Software Engineer

July 2019 - June 2020

I primarily work on the B2B E-Commerce application called ArmourHouse. ArmourHouse processes over a billion dollars in sales annually. I work on a multidisciplinary team in an agile environment with continuous integration and deployment.

  • Led a project to create a design-build system using styled components, typescript, and storybook.
  • Led development effort to convert components to be 508 compliant.
  • Worked on a large-scale E-Commerce application with a 99.9% uptime using React, Redux, React Router, Apollo, and GraphQL.
  • Created API GraphQL endpoints in Scala and PostgreSQL.
  • Performed developer code reviews and pull requests.

Happy Cog New York (Remote)

Happy Cog is a prominent digital agency in New York. They provide a full range of web services, including design, development, and marketing. Happy Cog is a preferred partner of CraftCMS.

Developer, UX Designer

February 2019 - July 2019

I was a development lead and UX designer for a React web application for a USA Today subsidiary. In addition, I was a member of the &Pizza development team building scalable Angular components for E-commerce and marketing web applications.

  • Led development for headless web applications built with React, React Router, and Redux. The single-page applications were WCAG-compliant interfaces pulling data from backends built in PHP and Python.
  • Led design workshops for best practices in usability, accessibility, and semantic HTML.
  • Deployed Angular components to &Pizza using continuous integration and deployment strategize built into GitHub.
  • Mocked multiple client interfaces for A/B usability reviews with custom elements for rapid prototyping.

Alexander Tom Inc Baltimore

Alex+Tom is an award-winning digital agency in the Baltimore area. Alex+Tom provides various services, including design, development, usability testing, and marketing. Alex+Tom was founded over twenty-five years ago and has been a leading usability agency for the last fifteen years.

Tech Lead

November 2011 - March 2019

I was a development lead and UX designer for clients, including the Department of Treasury and the National Park Service. I created award-winning interfaces and web services for government agencies and corporate companies.

  • Supervised a full-stack development team with onboarding, code reviews, and project coordination.
  • Created over fifteen award-winning user interfaces using vanilla Javascript, React, Ember, and Angular.
  • Created server-side web services using Ruby, PHP, and Node. These web services were created in REST or GraphQL using the MVC architectural pattern.
  • Mentored stakeholders, designers, content managers, and other developers in creating user-driven and accessible interfaces.
  • Utilized an agile development approach to iterate interactive usability and eye-tracking tests. Rapid prototyping daily based on user feedback for comparative analysis.
  • Configured and maintained Linux servers for production sites on Amazon EC2. Used Linux distros CentOS, RedHat, and Amazon Linux AMI FedRAMP-certified servers.

Client work includes:

  • Department of Treasury
  • National Parks Service
  • Export-Import Bank of United States
  • Chase Bank
  • HMSHost
  • JJ Haines
  • Star Spangled 200
  • The Stronach Group
  • US/ICOMS
  • 98Rock

Kelly & Associates Hunt Valley

Kelly & Associates is an insurance and payroll company located in Hunt Valley, Maryland. Kelly & Associates is one or the nation's largest providers of benefits administration and technology. Kelly & Associates provides a full range of internal services for users and brokers.

QA Developer

June 2010 - September 2011 (Internship)

Led the automated quality insurance testing. Provided daily reports on system status and test results. Created ASP webpages using C#.

  • Created unit and integration tests with Selenium toolkit written in C#. Update the automated scripts daily for development changes.
  • Created ASP pages using test driven development.
  • Meet with business users during the discovery process for requirements gathering.

Code Examples

I to like challenge myself with oddball projects for fun. I started collecting them on my resume as example samples of a basic working knowledge.

Headless CMS with React

Create a single page application using the libraries React and React Router to pull data from a headless CMS.

For this challenge, I decided to make an application for my dog. My wife loves take pictures of him so I built the site with CraftCMS so she can upload and tag photos and modify the content of each route.

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Whack-A-Mole

Create a Whack A Mole game using vanilla JS.

This was an interview challenge that I thought was fun. The requirements were to build a game using no frameworks so a user can play a game of whack-a-mole online.

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Education

Applied Information Technology

Masters of Science

Towson University

I excelled at database management during the program. I learned to love and respect Linux operation system in a computer forensic course. I learned to express myself through drawling during the program.

Sports Management

Bachelors of Science

Towson University

I excelled at mathematical logic during the program. I learned to love Economics in my Microeconomics and Macroeconomics courses. I learned to clear and concise communication skills.