Fernando Mendes
Staff Software Engineer at River
Porto, Porto, Portugal
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolFernando Mendes is a Staff Software Engineer based in Porto with 12 years of experience building full-stack and front-end systems and leading engineering teams. He combines technical leadership—most recently as Staff Engineer at River and previously as an Engineering Team Leader and startup CEO—with hands-on contributions to open-source projects like the popular SimpleMDE markdown editor and the geometry zsh prompt, where he improved build processes, editor internals and git-status integrations. Fernando’s background spans backend and frontend roles across product-focused agencies and startups, giving him both architectural sensibility and product-minded execution. He holds an MSc in Software Engineering from Universidade do Minho and is known for pragmatic refactors that enhance developer ergonomics and shipping polished UX improvements that quietly reduce long-term maintenance cost.
12 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science (MSc) Software Engineering, Master of Science (MSc) Software Engineering at Universidade do MinhoScience and Technology, Science and Technology at Escola Secundária Sá de Miranda
Portuguese, English, German, Spanish, French
Github Skills (17)
git10
javascript10
wordpress-themes10
prompt10
ui-theme10
prompter10
shell10
codemirror10
zsh10
css9
gulp9
markdown-it8
front-end-development8
markdown8
automation-testing7
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
geometry-zsh/geometry
Apr 2016 - Jul 2020
geometry is a minimal, fully customizable and composable zsh prompt theme
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:2 releases, 3 reviews, 43 commits in 4 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Fernando primarily contributed to the `geometry-zsh/geometry` repository by enhancing the Zsh prompt theme's Git integration. Their work involved adding features to display Git status information, including unpushed and unpulled changes, rebasing status, and conflict indicators. They refactored code for better customization and implemented features like calculating and displaying the prompt character size.
zsh-promptcustomizablecomposablepromptshell
sparksuite/simplemde-markdown-editor
Jul 2015 - Aug 2015
A simple, beautiful, and embeddable JavaScript Markdown editor. Delightful editing for beginners and experts alike. Features built-in autosaving and spell checking.
Role in this project:Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:10 commits, 1 PR, 1 comment in 21 days
Contributions summary:Fernando primarily focused on enhancing the functionality and structure of the SimpleMDE Markdown editor. They introduced a build process using Gulp to handle tasks like minifying CSS and JavaScript files and concatenating them into optimized bundles. Additionally, the user implemented improvements to the editor's core logic, including getter and setter modifications for the editor's value, ensuring correct handling of the text content, along with syncing with the base repository and applying the latest CSS updates.
expertswysiwygjavascriptfor-beginnersspell
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