Gabriel Castillo is a Staff Software Engineer at Pandora at Pandora. He possess expertise in php, jquery, sql, javascript, html5 and 10 more skills. Colleagues describe him as "Gabriel and I worked closely for many years. He initially started by hitting the ground running with a UI overhaul of the entire site -- a site that serves millions of customers transacting millions of dollars per week. Every month after that point he sought more responsibility in Kiva's projects. He wants to learn and he wants to build. Eventually he architected a modern front-end platform for Kiva's future. This massive project was lead and executed by him with some auxiliary help from a few engineers, where their work was directed by him. It's one of those projects that pushes engineers as well as the business forward in the most positive ways possible. He has a genuine inquisitiveness as well as passion and heart that overflows in his work. I drew upon that daily in my own job. He has been one of the highest performing engineers I've worked with at Kiva. I would run at the chance to work with him no matter what the job would be.", "I wish I could replicate Gabriel. When he first started at Kiva (on the same start date), he had little programming background. He was a master at CSS3/HTML5, which was why we hired him, but over time, he's studied deep and learned so much that Kiva now turns to him to evaluate our move to a JS-based MVC framework for how our entire AJAX framework is built. For someone who was there at the start of Gabriel's time at Kiva, they wouldn't have predicted where he ended up based on normal team-member growth. But Gabriel is exceptional in his desire and willingness to learn and he's tireless in his pursuit of knowledge. Gabriel is always looking to find the best standards to follow. His growth has been incredible and he now works to convert our front-end codebase to follow the best JS-standards (that no one else in the group had really been following). There have been many times where his research has produced significant and very beneficial changes to our approaches. When our talented designers come back with something that no one else knows how to implement, Gabriel has the answers(!)... answers which are not only elegant now, but provide for future implementations that share similar requirements. We can always look to Gabriel to implement what was requested and in a way that will grow with the future requests, through his use of best practices and existing jQuery plugins or writing his own. Gabriel is (and has been) a huge asset to Kiva for figuring out the future direction we should look toward. If I were to start my own company and wanted the best CSS3/HTML5/JS guru around, Gabriel would be my first choice to approach, my challenge would be to keep him as motivated as he is with Kiva. I look forward to what seeing what he'll produce/master next.", and "Saying that Gabriel Castillo "exceeded my expectations" would be putting it lightly. Let me explain. I hired Gabriel in September 2010 as a Production HTML engineer, to help us move content from our main site to our CMS, and to tidy up the HTML in our static pages. (Yawn.) Three short months later Gabriel was holding the HTML/CSS reins for a full site redesign. Five years of horrific markup crimes thrown out the window, and a brave new world of HTML5, CSS3 and a whole new style guide ushered in. A year later, Gabriel is writing essays outlining options for managing JS included in asynchronous requests and sharing best practices for remembering the horrifying details of "undefined" in Javascript. What is most remarkable about Gabriel is not just the speed at which he learns new technology, but the depth. During the Kiva site redesign project, Gabriel carefully researched each new technology that we were considering, presented his research to the team, and helped guide our decision making process. Ultimately we decided to follow his advice, add a host of new front-end technologies to our stack, completely throw away our old stylesheets and retool the HTML for nearly every page on the site. Gabriel inspired us to take this project rather further then we had first intended, but we were richly rewarded for our efforts with five-years of technical debt shed and an on-schedule and seamless release to boot!"