Joshua Nelson
Software Engineer at Figma
Mountain View, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJoshua Nelson is a seasoned software engineer with 13 years of experience, currently building developer-facing tooling at Figma after a multi-year run improving front-end performance and framework upgrades at Airbnb. He specializes in React and front-end build systems (Webpack, Babel, custom toolchains) and has over five years focused specifically on web performance, including introducing static style compilation and operating service workers at scale. Joshua has led framework migrations and creation of progressive upgrade systems that enabled A/B testing and measurable performance gains across large codebases. An active open-source contributor, he enhanced the zero-runtime CSS library Linaria and fixed cross-browser initialization issues in SkateJS, showing a knack for low-level DOM and CSS-in-JS problems. Based in Mountain View, he blends product-minded engineering with platform thinking, preferring the right tool for the job whether that’s microservices or single-page apps. Unexpectedly, his background also includes full-stack contributions to niche projects like a PHP CTF engine, reflecting a practical curiosity beyond mainstream front-end work.
14 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Australian National University
Github Skills (24)
javascript10
event-handling10
css-in-js10
css10
user-interface10
web-components10
graphical-user-interface10
human-interface10
php10
atomic10
html10
account-management10
react10
bootstrap9
back-end-development9
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
Nakiami/mellivora
Sep 2014 - Nov 2015
Mellivora is a CTF engine written in PHP
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:51 commits, 1 PR, 1 push in 1 year 2 months
Contributions summary:Joshua primarily focused on enhancing the user interface and backend functionality of the CTF engine. They implemented a modal-based login system and redesigned the register page, indicating a focus on user experience and account management. The user also modified the challenges page by placing them in boxes and added attachments to challenges. Furthermore, they improved the header and navigation structure and fixed redirect issues.
ctfphp
skatejs/skatejs
Sep 2014 - Oct 2016
Effortless custom elements powered by modern view libraries.
Role in this project:Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:31 commits, 15 PRs, 22 pushes in 2 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Joshua primarily focused on improving the core functionality of the skatejs library, specifically addressing initialization issues with web components and ensuring proper behavior across different browsers. Their contributions involved modifying the DOM initialization process, including handling DOMContentLoaded events and using document.readyState for more reliable behavior. Furthermore, the user addressed issues related to event handling and the triggering of custom events related to property changes.
web-componentsreactiveuijavascript
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