Jen Downs
UX Front-end Engineer at Microsoft
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJen Downs is a UX-focused front-end engineer with 10 years of experience building accessible, mobile-friendly web applications and open-source UI libraries using TypeScript and React. She has shipped consumer-facing, cross-platform features at Microsoft that reached millions of users and contributed to IBM’s Carbon Design System and its Gatsby theme, improving accessibility, localization, and Storybook integrations. Skilled at rapid prototyping and accessibility testing to WCAG and MAS standards, she pairs technical craft with close collaboration in Figma and cross-functional teams. Jen’s background in technical writing and enterprise UX practice informs her attention to detail, clear documentation, and empathetic product decisions.
10 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Master's Degree English and Technical Writing, Master's Degree English and Technical Writing at Louisiana Tech UniversityAssociate of Applied Science Computer Information Systems Web Programming, Associate of Applied Science Computer Information Systems Web Programming at Austin Community College
Github Skills (16)
html10
component-development10
system10
javascript10
scs10
carbon-design-system10
system-design10
sys10
gatsby10
sc10
react10
ui-components10
storybook10
accessibility9
css9
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
carbon-design-system/carbon
Aug 2018 - Sep 2020
A design system built by IBM
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:195 commits, 170 PRs, 419 comments in 2 years
Contributions summary:Jen primarily contributed to the development and maintenance of UI components within the Carbon Design System, focusing on Storybook integration. They implemented new features, fixed bugs, and updated existing components such as StructuredList, MultiSelect, ComboBox, DatePicker, and others, integrating storybook addons. They also made improvements to the documentation and examples for these components. The user's contributions included refactoring existing components and incorporating new theme tokens.
reactjavascriptdesign-systemibmdesign-systems
carbon-design-system/gatsby-theme-carbon
Jun 2019 - May 2020
A Carbon inspired Gatsby theme
Role in this project:Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:15 commits, 18 PRs, 50 comments in 11 months
Contributions summary:Jen primarily focused on front-end component enhancements and bug fixes within the Gatsby theme. Their contributions included resolving issues related to image cards, feature cards, and resource cards by adjusting rendering logic based on conditional parameters. They added new features such as the `autoPlay` prop for video components and improved accessibility by adding appropriate attributes and enhancing the structure of key components like the container and skip-to-content functionality. Furthermore, the user made modifications to the code blocks and added support for localization.
gatsbyreactgatsby-theme-carbongatsbyjscarbon
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