Zach Leatherman
Lead Software Engineer at 11ty
United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolZach Leatherman is a lead software engineer with 15 years building fast, accessible, and responsive web experiences, currently leading engineering at Font Awesome while continuing to maintain the award-winning Eleventy static site generator. He specializes in web performance, fonts, responsive design, and the Indie/Open Web, and has contributed to widely used projects like Eleventy, Respond, and Jamstack.org. Zach bridges practical front-end craftsmanship with tooling and infrastructure work—shipping features like i18n improvements, async CSS loading callbacks, and single-file web components. Known for improving cross-browser compatibility and developer ergonomics, he pairs deep technical chops with public speaking, writing, and community organizing. An unexpected detail: his open-source work ranges from polishing UX of responsive tables to creating a jQuery plugin that dynamically fits text to containers, showing both attention to micro-interactions and large-scale site performance.
16 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS Computer Engineering, Bachelor of Science - BS Computer Engineering at University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Stackoverflow
3,328reputation
2.1mreached
8answers
2questions
css
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svg
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webkit
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git
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git-submodules
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Github Skills (47)
accessibility10
unit-testing10
json10
apim10
eleventy10
javascript10
media-queries10
jquery10
testing10
css10
internationalization10
user-interface10
web-components10
backward-compatibility10
ui-design10
Programming languages (23)
Github contributions (5)
zachleat/BigText
Jan 2011 - Oct 2017
jQuery plugin, calculates the font-size and word-spacing needed to match a line of text to a specific width.
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:103 commits, 51 PRs, 23 pushes in 6 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Zach primarily focused on enhancing the BigText jQuery plugin, adding new features and fixing bugs. The contributions include implementing contenteditable functionality, adding keyboard shortcuts, and improving the fadeout effect. Additionally, the user addressed IE8 compatibility issues and refactored code for better overall performance and user experience. These commits showcase a dedication to refining the plugin's usability and cross-browser compatibility.
font-sizejquery-plugin
filamentgroup/SocialCount
Jul 2012 - Nov 2018
Unmaintained (see the README): Simple barebones project to show share counts from various social networks.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2 releases, 172 commits, 39 PRs in 6 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Zach's primary contribution appears to be the creation and testing of a PHP-based service to retrieve share counts from social media APIs. They implemented classes for interacting with Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, and ShareThis, handling API calls and JSON parsing. The code changes include the creation of a service endpoint and the implementation of unit tests for the various social networking services.
third-party-javascriptwidgetjstreefacebookcounts
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