Kevin Slodic Logo

About

Who is this person?

tl;dr

I'm Kevin Slodic (he/him/his); a front-end engineering leader with over 17 years of professional experience based out of Las Vegas, NV.

I'm creative; have an eye for design; am collaborative & communicative; and am passionate about web standards, accessibility, and performance.

Humble Beginnings

It all started as a hobby designing and building friends' bands' webpages using simple HTML and an overabundance of the <font> tag. Who knew that it'd turn into a career in web development/engineering.

The Rubber City

I officially kicked off my foray into the programming world with a stint at the University of Akron studying Computer Science. I tackled courses like Discrete Mathematics and Intro. to Computer Science with my trusty Deitel - C++ How to Program Fourth Edition—which I still have to this day.

Building and designing for the WWW was still relatively new and there wasn't much coursework focused on web development, so I felt I needed to change things up to hone in on my passion.

The Tree City

I decided to transfer to Kent State University as they offered a larger variety of web-oriented curriculum. I tackled such coursework as: Web Database Integration, Web Scripting, Digital Imaging, and Advanced Flash.

I finished my degree a semester early in December 2006 graduating summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Science degree in Technology.

Semi-Pro

Whilst still in school, I ended up working for a local Cleveland, Ohio bank (i.e. Park View Federal Savings Back, now bought by First National) as a web developer creating Flash Ads, building functionality on their intranet portal, and contributing to an ACH application.

Going Pro

Cleaning Crew

I started my career with TTI Floor Care North America—the parent company of the Dirt Devil, Hoover, and Oreck vacuum cleaner brands—as a Web Application Programmer. For 8.5 years, I developed numerous applications including:

  • The ecommerce shopping cart
  • The dirtdevil.com and hoover.com ecommerce websites
  • The internal product information management system (a.k.a. PIM)
  • A digital asset management system
  • An ecommerce dashboard reporting application
  • The internal CRM

Commerce, Customer Service, Company Culture, and Community

Needing a new challenge, I joined Zappos.com as a Senior Front-end Developer. For 2 years, I worked primarily on the top funnel experiences: home, landing, search, and product detail pages as well as the header and footer.

Wanting to expand my technical skillset, I transitioned into an engineering manager and for 4.5 years I managed a cross-functional group of engineers (front-end, back-end, and QA) and UX designers building the top funnel experiences.

Quit Slackin'

Wanting to get back into IC work, I joined Slack (a Salesforce company) as a Staff Front-end Engineer. I worked for the Adoption team managing the invite experience and contributed to projects including:

  • Accept in Slack
  • Invite Suggestions
  • Connectable Contacts

A New Door

An opportunity with Opendoor presented itself and I currently work as a Staff Front-end Engineer on the Open Exchange team building and maintaing an app that brokers transactions between Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs).