I am an expert at using open source technologies to quickly build maintainable, secure, and testable web applications.
Hello, I am Brendan McLoughlin, I'm a Senior Principal Engineer at CarGurus. I lead initiatives at CarGurus to build the best car selling experience on the web. I also focusing on evolving our system-wide architecture within the constraints of our existing stack to meet and exceed business and customer expectations.
My background is a front end expert, but these days I fill an architect role who is desperately trying to get back into a "solver" archetype because I love helping clients and colleagues build large-scale responsive web applications. I have a bias for action, I like to solve problems and create value for customers. I can deliver a message to Garcia.
In the past I've contributed to many open source projects including being a member of the Ember Data core team.
I believe that communication, code reviews, unit testing and taking advantage of open source libraries are essential to developing a modern software product.
I am proactive about communicating my plans, progress, and problems.
I believe the feedback from unit testing is invaluable for developing quality software. I write tests for my code an love pairing with my teammates to coach and collaborate with them on testing.
I find that by taking advantage of premade open source modules and components my team can deliver better software faster and cheaper and have more time to spend on solving our customer's unique challenges. I encourage my teammates to adopt open source solutions whenever possible.
Feel free to send me an email at btmcloughlin@gmail.com for just about any reason.
Seasoned and creative software leader, experienced leading teams to develop ambitious open web applications.
My senior principal engineer role at CarGurus involves supporting the five teams within the wholesale organization (~30 engineers) to support product work and help my colleagues build and ship features quickly. I'm rarely in the critical path for feature development but I help my teams by unblocking work, fighting production fires and prioritizing the quarterly technical roadmap.
I'm also a member of the Technical Leadership Team, where I help address define standards, engineering policies, best practices, and patterns. My focus here is on cross cutting concerns that impact multiple orgs within the engineering function at CarGurus. I help shepherd ADRs to consensus, curate the tech radar and ensure the right teams are communicating.
At Bocoup, I worked alongside some of the best JavaScript developers in the business. As a consultant, I worked at clients like RueLaLa, Constant Contact, Mozilla, Mass Mutual, Northwestern Mutual, Xively, WFMU, In-Q-Tel, and Harvard Business Publishing helping them to level up their team during a period of time when front end tools and frameworks were rapidly evolving.
I worked hard to keep my skills sharp as tooling transitioned from grunt to gulp to webpack, package managers evolved from vendored folders to bower to npm and yarn and frameworks matured from jQuery, to Angular to Ember to React. Over the years I contributed to many of these projects as I worked to advance the state of what is possible on the web.
I also got to see how the sausage was made, by working with the Chrome and WebKit team on browser specification compliance and building tooling to make it easy for different browser implementations to run the same shared test suit.
My educational background.
I am absolutely passionate software developer. Here are some of my favorite tools and technologies and why I love working with them.
I primarily work in JavaScript and Python. However, on past projects I've also worked with Java, PHP, Ruby and Rust.
I'm a frontend expert with a deep knowledge of the capabilites and limitations of the web platform. I believe every website is a distributed system with state living on both the browser and server and the key challenge of web developers is to try to keep it all insync without exposing the user to the technical and physical challenges of making that happen.
My career focus has been primarily on building great browser experiences. However, I love the control and flexibility that is possible when writing code for the server. I prefer to take advantage of the enforced data constraints of a SQL database and leverage frameworks for solutions to common problems so I can focus on writing code that solves the unique challenges of my domain.
I'm a big fan of AWS and have used it as the backend for several client projects I've worked on.