Senior agentic
product engineer.

• 01Spec

  Work starts as a written spec: feature definition, bounds of scope, and acceptance criteria. Spec-driven engineering settles open questions before any code exists, and every later phase validates against it.

• 02Plan

  Engineering effort goes where experience and taste matter most: robust technical architecture and a clear implementation plan, built on proven frameworks and patterns, and weighed against existing systems, customer needs, and business goals.

• 03Build

  Agents take on the rote implementation: the boilerplate and repetitive code engineers used to type and retype. Running in parallel, they turn a good plan into working software fast, and free the engineer for higher-level thinking: directing the work, catching problems early, and keeping applications coherent as they grow.

• 04Verify

  Verification is what makes agent-written code trustworthy. Every change is validated against the acceptance criteria with unit tests for logic, end-to-end tests for user flows, and visual regression for the interface. Agents make tests cheap to write, so coverage goes well past what a deadline used to allow.

• 05Review

  Pull requests are built for confident review: clear context, evidence that it works, and a trail back to the spec. Agent review handles the mechanical pass, so human review, on my work and teammates’ alike, can focus on design and judgement.

• Late 1990s

  Web 1.0

  The early days of Netscape and a visual web, when the Internet was young. Pages built by hand: tables for layout and far too many 1px spacer.gifs.

  • HTML
  • GIFs
  • Image maps
  • Frames
  • FTP

• Early 2000s

  CSS and Flash

  The browser wars, and the web learning to move. Built interactive sites in Flash and ActionScript, while layouts moved from tables to CSS one IE6 hack at a time.

  • Flash
  • ActionScript
  • SWFObject
  • CSS
  • Internet Explorer 6
  • Server-side includes
  • CGI scripts
  • Dreamweaver
  • BBEdit
  • Photoshop
  • Illustrator

• 2005–2020

  WordPress and web standards

  The web standards years, when semantic markup and CSS layout were a cause worth arguing for. Freelancing as Little Penguin Studio since 2000, with WordPress as the constant for fifteen years.

  • WordPress
  • PHP
  • MySQL
  • phpMyAdmin
  • HTML5
  • JavaScript
  • CSS reset
  • 960 Grid
  • CSS sprites
  • @font-face
  • Cufon
  • jQuery
  • Modernizr
  • Silverlight
  • Firebug
  • TextMate
  • Google Analytics
  • Git
  • SVN
  • Apache
  • cPanel
  • MAMP

• 2012–2015

  Responsive and component libraries

  Phones turned every layout into a question of screen width. At Domain7, shipped the team’s first responsive sites and introduced component libraries, including Librarian, an open-source PHP tool for SCSS UI libraries.

  • WordPress
  • WP-CLI
  • Drupal
  • Sass
  • Less
  • Stylus
  • Compass
  • Susy
  • Bootstrap
  • BEM
  • normalize.css
  • Media queries
  • Autoprefixer
  • jQuery
  • Harvey.js
  • Grunt
  • Gulp
  • Bower
  • Browsersync
  • Atomic design
  • Sketch
  • Font Awesome
  • IcoMoon

• Mid 2010s

  Decoupled frontends

  A new JavaScript framework every month, and the CMS turning into an API. Spoke at WordCamp 2015 on headless WordPress: the WP API feeding decoupled Angular frontends.

  • WordPress
  • WP REST API
  • Angular
  • Ember
  • Handlebars
  • Lodash
  • Underscore
  • Moment.js
  • Karma
  • Browserify

• 2015–2019

  React

  Components won, and frontends became applications with a build step. Headless WordPress feeding React at Carter Hales, Vue contract work for Invoke, then frontend lead at MEC.

  • React
  • Redux
  • Redux Thunk
  • React Router
  • PropTypes
  • Create React App
  • Vue
  • ES6
  • SCSS / CSS Modules
  • Axios
  • Jasmine
  • Mocha
  • Chai
  • Enzyme
  • BrowserStack
  • Webpack
  • Babel
  • Yarn
  • Storybook

• 2019–2022

  Design systems at scale

  Design systems grew into infrastructure, with design and code sharing one source of truth. Staff engineer for design systems at Thinkific, and primary engineer on the React and Storybook system behind most of its products.

  • Storybook
  • Design tokens
  • Radix UI
  • Chromatic
  • TypeScript
  • Emotion
  • styled-components
  • React
  • GraphQL
  • Apollo Client
  • Jest
  • Testing Library
  • Cypress
  • Monorepos
  • Lerna
  • Nx
  • ESLint
  • Prettier
  • Figma

• 2020s

  Full-stack TypeScript

  TypeScript became the default, and frontend engineers started owning the server too. Next.js end to end, deployed on Vercel, and the stack behind my own products, including Soundmap.

  • TypeScript
  • Next.js
  • Node
  • Tailwind
  • shadcn/ui
  • Nuxt
  • SwiftUI
  • Supabase
  • Prisma
  • Zod
  • TanStack Query
  • Vitest
  • Playwright
  • Vite
  • pnpm
  • Docker
  • Vercel
  • S3
  • ffmpeg

• Now

  Agentic engineering

  The biggest shift since Netscape. Claude Code and Cursor write most of the code, engineering moves up to architecture, planning, and review, and every change still ships as a pull request I own.

  • Claude Code
  • Cursor
  • MCP
  • AI SDK
  • Spec-driven
  • Plan mode
  • Subagents
  • Skills
  • CLAUDE.md
  • AGENTS.md
  • Git worktrees
  • Git

Email is the best way to reach me. Always happy to talk frontend architecture, design systems, and agentic engineering.

hello@nathansh.comcopy