Summary
David Desandro is a Staff UX Engineer with 16 years blending front-end engineering and design, currently shaping product UX at Cityblock Health from his base in Vienna, Virginia. He is best known for authoring popular open-source JavaScript libraries like Masonry, Isotope, and Flickity—collectively earning tens of thousands of stars and demonstrating a long track record of shipping polished, reusable UI components. His career spans startups and enterprise work, from building documentation and design systems at Fictive Kin and Compass to running Metafizzy, a one-person commercial library business that closed thousands of issues and produced extensive demo-driven docs. He pairs practical React/TypeScript and design-token expertise with an eye for performance and accessibility, having re-vectorized icon sets and reduced asset sizes in production systems. Notably, he has turned product-design outcomes into measurable wins, such as reclaiming top SEO results and tracking design-system adoption across large codebases.
16 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Graphic & Web Design, Graphic & Web Design at Center for Digital Imaging Arts at Boston University
Bachelor of Arts - BA Communication and Media Studies, Bachelor of Arts - BA Communication and Media Studies at James Madison University