John Polacek
Senior Software Engineer at Veterinary Emergency Group
Darien, Illinois, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJohn Polacek is a pragmatic Senior Software Engineer with 15 years of experience building polished front-end experiences and shipping production-ready web products. Currently at Veterinary Emergency Group after leadership and senior engineering roles at Howl and Community Brands, he excels at turning ideas into working interfaces and reliable systems. A longtime jQuery-era open-source contributor, he authored and maintained several popular front-end plugins (BigVideo, scrollorama/ScrollMagic lineage, stacktable) that showcase a knack for responsive UI, animation, and developer-friendly demos. Based in the Chicago area, he pairs a BFA in Illustration with deep technical chops—bringing a designer’s eye to frontend engineering and a preference for execution over theory. Colleagues know him for diving into the nitty-gritty to solve tricky UX and integration problems while keeping product momentum moving.
15 years of coding experience
26 years of employment as a software developer
BFA Illustration, BFA Illustration at Northern Illinois University
Stackoverflow
2,750reputation
508kreached
18answers
1question
layout
top-5%
dom
top-5%
jquery
top-5%
fonts
top-5%
Github Skills (24)
javascript10
jquery10
animation10
css10
responsive-design10
ui-design10
uid10
front-end-development10
html10
fonts9
layout9
plugin-development9
dom9
videojs9
user-interface8
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
johnpolacek/scrolldeck.js
Dec 2011 - Dec 2015
jQuery plugin for making scrolling presentation decks
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:107 commits, 8 pushes in 4 years 1 month
Contributions summary:John primarily focused on enhancing the user interface and functionality of the scrolling presentation deck plugin. Their commits reveal modifications to JavaScript files (specifically `jquery.scrolldeck.js`) to update scrolling events, navigation buttons, and slide indexing. They also made changes to the `index.html` and `style.css` files, indicating involvement in the creation of the user interface elements, styling and layout of the presentation deck. Furthermore, the user worked on integrating a parallax effect into the presentation.
presentationmarkerjqueryscrollingjavascript
johnpolacek/superscrollorama
May 2012 - Mar 2018
The original jQuery plugin for supercool scroll animation. NOTE: No longer under active development. New version is ScrollMagic.js
Role in this project:Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:72 commits, 1 PR, 10 pushes in 5 years 11 months
Contributions summary:John primarily contributed to the user interface of the project. They fixed the z-index of the GitHub fork link and adjusted the z-index of title info and download links. They also updated the download links and added two simple demos. Furthermore, the user addressed styling issues by fixing a flash of pre-animated content. Finally, they updated the greensock library and fixed the jquery links.
animationscrollerscrolljqueryscrolling
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