Thomas Knickman
Senior Software Engineer at Vercel
Baltimore, Maryland, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolThomas Knickman is a Senior Software Engineer with 10 years of full-stack experience building performant web platforms for startups and mid-size tech companies. Currently at Vercel, he contributes to Turborepo and Next.js, focusing on front-end UX, tooling, and example apps for widely used open-source frameworks. Previously at Momentive/SurveyMonkey and Under Armour he led cross-functional teams, drove frontend performance improvements (including a 32% bundle-size reduction and faster TTI migrations), and co-owned GraphQL infrastructure critical to product development. He combines hands-on implementation—React, Node, Python—with developer productivity initiatives like custom tooling and CI integrations that materially reduced costs and onboarding time. Based in Baltimore, he also brings entrepreneurial instincts from founding two web businesses, showing a knack for shipping pragmatic, user-focused solutions.
10 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer Science at Franklin & Marshall College
English, Spanish
Stackoverflow
4,416reputation
475kreached
64answers
40questions
yaml
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python
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jinja2
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indexing
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Github Skills (26)
javascript10
ui-components10
typescript10
nextjs10
ui-design10
uid10
turborepo10
tailwindcss10
front-end-development10
typescript-types10
nodejs10
typescripts10
react10
python9
jinja29
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
vercel/turborepo
Dec 2021 - Jan 2023
Build system optimized for JavaScript and TypeScript, written in Rust
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:14 releases, 1514 reviews, 360 commits in 1 year 1 month
Contributions summary:Thomas primarily focused on front-end development, contributing to the UI of a kitchen sink application within the Turborepo repository. They implemented React runtime injection for the UI package, added new UI components (CounterButton, NewTabLink), and created a Card component to demonstrate a bundle size comparison. Additionally, the user updated various pages and components within the basic starter, including pages for store and blog applications, while also modifying related documentation.
monorepoincrementalturborepobundlerrust
vercel/next.js
Dec 2021 - Sep 2022
The React Framework
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:14 reviews, 4 commits, 11 PRs in 9 months
Contributions summary:Thomas primarily focused on updating and maintaining example applications within the Next.js framework. They updated the `blog-starter` and `blog-starter-typescript` examples to use Tailwind CSS v3 and adapted various components to reflect the changes. Additionally, they contributed to the Turborepo project within the repository by adding features like an update notifier, enhancements to error handling, and support for disabling the update notifier. Furthermore, they implemented the `turbo migrate` command to assist users in updating the turbo project.
reactbrowserssgserver-renderingjavascript
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