“At Timely, Elwyn was often described as a dev wizard and I had the pleasure to work with him on multiple projects. He is not only thoughtful in the implementation of technical aspects of projects, but also considers the user's perspective which has contributed to the overall success of the projects we've shared together. Elwyn excels in delivering quality work in record time and bringing to light edge cases and concepts that should be considered by the team. Grab any chance you can to work with Elwyn he will definitely magic up some wondrous code.”
Elwyn Benson
Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand
539 followers
500+ connections
Experience
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Timely
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Education
Publications
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Improving the perceived loading time of the new Trade Me site
Default To Open (Trade Me blog)
See publicationBlog post describing some of the techniques we used to make the new web app feel faster.
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Sketch Interaction in Real Time Strategy Games
The 7th Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment
Conference paper based on my honours research project at Victoria University.
This paper explores sketching as an interaction technique, and discusses some of the advantages and disadvantages of sketching for spatial tasks, which are common in real time strategy games. The paper describes two novel sketch interaction techniques for giving precise orders to units - a technique for selecting groups of units, and a technique for specifying movement paths.Other authors -
Projects
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Trade Me front-end rewrite as a progressive web app
See project"Preview" is a rewrite of the Trade Me front-end from VB / ASP.NET WebForms to a responsive progressive web app built on modern technologies, including: Angular (formerly AngularJS), TypeScript, RxJS, NgRx (the Angular equivalent of React's Redux), WebPack, Jest (formerly Karma), Tractor (a wrapper over Protractor / Selenium).
Preview is an ongoing project who's eventual aim is to retire the mobile "Touch" site and the desktop "Classic" site. Currently a percentage of mobile web-traffic…"Preview" is a rewrite of the Trade Me front-end from VB / ASP.NET WebForms to a responsive progressive web app built on modern technologies, including: Angular (formerly AngularJS), TypeScript, RxJS, NgRx (the Angular equivalent of React's Redux), WebPack, Jest (formerly Karma), Tractor (a wrapper over Protractor / Selenium).
Preview is an ongoing project who's eventual aim is to retire the mobile "Touch" site and the desktop "Classic" site. Currently a percentage of mobile web-traffic is using Preview, and initial metrics show the application is performing well.
I have been involved since the start, helping make key decisions around our tech stack and framework choices, building initial application architecture and evolving it through to the reactive modulariased app we have today. I have built much of the cross-cutting infrastructure of the project, such as authentication, a generated TypeScript SDK for the Trade Me API, build pipeline, devops bits and pieces (linting, unit test runners, IDE integrations / templates), error reporting and triaging, and security hardening.
As part of building Preview our team also started Tangram, a design system + Angular implementation of said system which all of Preview is built with. Tangram is now a product of it's own which is being used by teams across Trade Me to build a variety of new projects.
I am constantly working with my team to push forward the Preview platform and to embrace and apply modern web technologies where appropriate. For example, using Service Workers to provide an offline experience and aggressively cache our application bundles. I am currently building a NodeJS server for Preview which uses Angular Universal to provide server-side pre-rendering of Preview. As part of this we are moving to a Docker / Kubernetes setup for improved continuous delivery. -
grabaride
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grabaride was a carpooling/ridesharing website which helped match up people with empty seats in their cars, and people looking for cheap or free transport around New Zealand.
I was one of two founders of grabaride, and the sole developer. I was involved in all apsects of the project, including branding, design, front end development, backend development, server setup and deployments.
grabaride ran on the ASP.NET MVC 3 framework with a responsive frontend crafted with HTML5, CSS3…grabaride was a carpooling/ridesharing website which helped match up people with empty seats in their cars, and people looking for cheap or free transport around New Zealand.
I was one of two founders of grabaride, and the sole developer. I was involved in all apsects of the project, including branding, design, front end development, backend development, server setup and deployments.
grabaride ran on the ASP.NET MVC 3 framework with a responsive frontend crafted with HTML5, CSS3 (using SASS/Compass) and JavaScript (using jQuery).Other creators -
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