Ed Spencer Email & Phone Number

North Port, Fl, Us

In April 2023 I granted myself between 1 and 2 years as a free agent, free to do whatever I wanted on any given day. I spent the first several months learning "dad skills" - the type that involves fixing and building things, not being an actual dad (I am not one... No plans.). All those home improvement projects that were on my mind but I didn't have time to do got done, but before long my mind returned to software.Since OpenAI started making waves I've been highly interested in how AI and UI intersect. I strongly believe that the static UIs of today will make way in many cases to AI-driven UIs - not a chatbot stuck in the bottom corner, but truly generative UIs that are created and displayed in real-time in reaction to what the user is doing. The advent of React Server Components are another enabling technology here, and I've spent a lot of time lately blogging about those at https://edspencer.net, as well as creating a full suite of examples for other developers to use at https://rsc-examples.edspencer.netAs of the summer of 2024 I spend most of my time working on how best to utilize LLMs with the Vercel AI SDK to stream generative UIs to users to enable user-specific interfaces that the previous generation of technologies couldn't dream of providing.

San Francisco, California, Us

I joined Origin Protocol to recombine with my friend Nick, with whom I started my career 20 years earlier. Origin was doing things with NFTs and defi, back when those things were cool. They had also assembled a very talented group of engineers, so there was a lot of opportunity to learn new things after having spent the previous 5 years working mainly on one product.Although I spent the first few months working on UI stuff, after a while I pivoted to sort out the way we deployed software. After having spent 6 months at Palo Alto Networks turning an antiquated manual deployment process into a full CICD to production one, it was clear that Origin would benefit from the same. During this time I got pretty good with Terraform, and before long we had N-environment CICD to replace the old hand-built prod and (heavily-contended) staging environments.Ultimately, the crypto industry didn't turn out to be something that aligned well with my own compass. I enjoy solving difficult and genuine problems to make people's lives a little easier in some way. Capitalism is well set up to reward folks who do that. Perhaps crypto will grow into something that can achieve this, but at least as of 2023 it didn't feel like it was. I left the company and decided to follow my heart for a year or two, deep diving into the intersection of AI and UI and blogging a bunch at https://edspencer.net

Santa Clara, California, Us

I joined PANW as a contractor initially, working on AutoFocus, a product that helps security researchers identify new malware attacks as they traverse our firewalls. After a few months it was clear that we liked each other a lot, so we tied the knot and I became a full time employee.PANW was one of my favorite professional experiences, and the only company I've worked at so far that wasn't a startup. I spent the first few years there as a Principal Engineer, then a Senior Principal Engineer, working as a full stack engineer on AutoFocus. React, TypeScript, mocha, webpack and babel was the stack.After a couple of years of this I was tapped to become an engineering manager. While I don't find management as fun as engineering (few engineers do...), it seemed the right way forward for our little team and I ended up being ok at it. Among the achievements I am most proud of during that time are taking our 6-month release process and turning it into CICD to production - often releasing 20 times per week, and hiring people who could do great work and push the team forward.I learned a lot about engineering for grown-ups, embraced IaC, TypeScript, and other technologies that increase developer productivity, as well as how much stakeholders outside of the engineering bubble can teach you if you just talk to them.

Redwood City, California, Us

My chief contribution to C3 has been the architecting and development of the UI framework that now powers all of our products. Built on the solid foundation of jQuery, Bootstrap, LESS and a handful of other open source technologies, it has delivered an enormous performance improvement over the previous tech we used (which happened to be a Sencha framework), as well as a similar improvement in our development productivity.Currently I lead a small internal team that enhances the framework. I have a strong vision of how our UI should work, and where the bar needs to be set in terms of quality. A few things I feel I bring to the role:* Relentless focus on code quality, unit testing and sensible APIs* Deep experience with web technologies, especially JavaScript* Strong vision for how things should fit together into a cohesive whole

Austin, Tx, Us

I started using Sencha's technology long before I joined the company. I loved their stuff and started getting very active in their community. One serendipitous trip to San Francisco changed all that, and I found myself joining the newly Sequoia-funded Sencha when it was just 10 people in a tiny office.At Sencha I took responsibility for the Ext JS framework, creating releases 3.2 and 3.3 which contained many new components and UX capabilities. I also co-authored Sencha Touch 1 and 2, which was the first HTML5 mobile web framework, and still the one that feels by far the nearest simile of native apps.For Ext JS 4 I brought the MVC pattern to the framework, writing an upgraded Data package as well as introducing Controllers and url-based routing. I also got pretty good at speaking to large audiences, having presented multiple times at each of our developer conferences.I joined when Sencha was ~10 people, left when it was around 100. I got to work on getting pretty good at JavaScript and a few other things, but what I really learned were a few lessons like this:* That it can be 99% perfect. But it's still totally broken* That heroic effort in the wrong direction is damaging* The importance of a vision

Set up small business with partner offering web application creation services in the UK. Responsible for all areas of business setup and management, lead generation and sales.