Michael Pennisi
Greater Boston United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top School
Top expert inWeb and Mobile Security Technologies
Michael Pennisi is a front-end-focused software engineer with 15 years of experience building robust web interfaces and developer tooling from Greater Boston. He combines deep practical skills in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with experience in libraries like Backbone and D3, plus server-side exposure to MySQL and Redis. Michael is a careful maintainer and tester who has improved quality across high-profile open-source projects including test262, web-platform-tests, Mocha, and Cheerio, contributing both code and comprehensive tests. His work spans UI polish—improving search heuristics and unread indicators—to low-level compatibility fixes and spec editorial changes for ECMAScript and web standards. Trained in CS and ECE at RPI with an MS in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon, he brings a usability-minded approach to engineering and documentation. A less obvious strength is his habit of improving developer experience through clearer docs, JSDoc-driven tooling, and test automation that prevents regressions.
15 years of coding experience
Boston College HighBS, Computer Science, Electrical & Computer Engineering, BS, Computer Science, Electrical & Computer Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic InstituteMS, Human Computer Interaction, MS, Human Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon University
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (60)
unit-testing10
spec10
javascript10
webpagetest10
modular10
matrix10
jquery10
api-design10
temporal10
testing10
technical-writing10
modularity10
css-selectors10
typescript10
test-framework10
Programming languages (27)
Github contributions (5)
jshint/jshint
Jan 2012 - Nov 2022
JSHint is a tool that helps to detect errors and potential problems in your JavaScript code
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Code Maintainer
Back-end Developer & Code MaintainerContributions:26 releases, 14 reviews, 813 commits in 11 years
Contributions summary:Michael primarily focused on improving the code quality and maintainability of the JSHint project. Their contributions involved fixing bugs, enhancing error reporting, and refactoring internal code components. They also added support for new features such as the ES8 and ES9 language features, further expanding the scope and capabilities of the project. Their work included addressing parsing issues, particularly related to optional chaining, and made some code enhancements.
problemsjavascriptstatic-code-analysisdetectjshint
misoproject/d3.chart
Jan 2013 - Jan 2016
A framework for creating reusable charts with d3.js.
Role in this project:Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:236 commits, 10 PRs, 5 pushes in 3 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Michael's commits primarily focus on refactoring the d3.chart library to use a more D3.js-like API. The changes include restructuring the code to better organize the chart logic by "layers," "lifecycle selections", and the introduction of new concepts, such as `mixin` and `demux`. This suggests a strong emphasis on enhancing the library's modularity and ease of use for front-end developers.
chartschartd3-jsreusablevisualization
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.