Chris Zarate
Software Engineer at Automattic
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolChris Zarate is a software engineer and product-focused leader with 14 years of experience building performant web platforms and developer tools, currently contributing to the WordPress VIP platform at Automattic from New York. He has led engineering teams at Quartz, driving web and mobile product delivery with an emphasis on performance, newsroom workflows, and measurable user experience improvements. A practical back-end specialist, Chris has made notable open-source contributions to widely used projects like webonyx/graphql-php and WP-GraphQL, adding Apollo compatibility and field-formatting features while improving testability. His work on WP-CLI and a cross-frame bookmarklet (SuperGenPass) shows a knack for solving interoperability and environment-specific security quirks. Colleagues describe him as a hands-on manager who moves fluidly between architecture, shipping product features, and fixing subtle code-level issues. He holds a bachelor’s from Rice University and brings a mix of engineering rigor and product sensibility to platform-scale problems.
14 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's degree, Bachelor's degree at Rice University
Github Skills (31)
unit-testing10
javascript10
graphql-php10
jquery10
back-end-development10
apidoc10
wordpress10
wpgraphql10
wp-cli10
php10
api10
wordpress-graphql10
graphql10
web-development10
server10
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
chriszarate/supergenpass
Feb 2012 - Nov 2019
A free bookmarklet password generator.
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:338 commits, 1 PR, 31 pushes in 7 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Chris was primarily involved in implementing and refining the SuperGenPass bookmarklet, which is a free password generator that runs in the browser. Their contributions focused on backporting and integrating features from previous versions, including fixes and improvements for keyboard shortcuts, form handling, and the display of the generated password. They were also responsible for ensuring the bookmarklet functioned correctly across different environments by adding code to conditionally load resources from HTTPS to avoid security warnings and ensure compatibility across frames.
passwordbookmarkletpassword-generator
wp-graphql/wp-graphql
Sep 2017 - Aug 2021
:rocket: GraphQL API for WordPress
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:38 reviews, 95 commits, 31 PRs in 3 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Chris primarily contributed to enhancing the functionality and features of the GraphQL API for WordPress. Their work included adding filtering capabilities to post object fields, specifically the content, title, and excerpt fields. The user also implemented support for raw and rendered formats of these fields, and refactored parts of the codebase for improved efficiency, testability, and maintainability. Unit tests were added to verify functionality and catch edge cases, covering the new features.
gatsbyapigraphql-apiwordpresswp-graphql
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