Hello, Tailwind Labs!
It's me, Josh Larson. I'm a fella from Iowa and a huge Tailwind CSS fan! This is an application for the Staff Software Engineer position.
Fun Facts about Josh
I cut my web dev teeth with WordPress at an ad agency
BEM and Atomic CSS used to be my jam, but I'm so glad they're not anymore
I was a huge Vue nerd before React introduced Hooks and won me over
I have two kids and two dogs
I was in the marching band and really enjoy making music
Sometimes I host a variety show in my basement with my friends
I co-founded a dog park management software startup with my wife (and yes, it's a Tailwind CSS project)
I chatted with Adam and Steve when I was on the Hydrogen team and we were shipping an initial version powered by Tailwind
I'm so close to opening a donut shop, you guys. It's my version of "quitting tech and becoming a fisherman."
But for real—why this job?
Working on the Tailwind Labs team would be a terrific match for my skillset.
I recently left my job at Shopify, where I led the team building Hydrogen. At the time, it was both React meta-framework implementing an early version of React Server Components and a headless UI library for commerce components.
I got super down and dirty with React and Tailwind in this role. Like, super dirty.useEffect? More like useGotToBeKiddingMe.
Fun fact: I referenced the Headless UI TypeScript definitions a ton when I was building Hydrogen's UI library. 😄 Generics FTW!
I'm passionate about building tools for developers, particularly in the front-end and JavaScript ecosystem.
I've built open-source projects like Flareact, an early clone of Next.js on Cloudflare Workers; and Superflare, a full-stack toolkit for Cloudflare.
I'm also a fan of getting my hands dirty and building really fun products from the ground-up. Here's an example: an in-browser image editor we created at Vox Media when I was working on the ad platform team.
Here's why I'm excited about Software Development at Tailwind CSS
Reason #1: Collaborating with other OSS projects
I think it would be super fun to build a Next.js bundler plugin for Tailwind CSS. Gotta be some cool opportunities there with their recent work with SWC and Turbopack, yeah?
When we built the first version of Hydrogen, Vite was in the wee early days. I spent a lot of time digging through the codebase and contributing fixes for bundling SSR on edge platforms like Cloudflare Workers
I'd also have a knack for campaigning for Tailwind CSS integration in other frameworks, since I've done this sort of thing before.
When React Server Components were still in the early RFC stages, I contributed to the discussion about how to designate client and server components, ultimately arriving at the "use client" and "use server" directives.
We also provided meaningful feedback to the React core team about Hydrogen's learnings from using server components in productions.
Streaming SSR was new to React 18 and in its infancy as well. I contributed a bug fix to React to support streaming in edge runtimes, and worked with the Cloudflare Workers team to fix the bug on their end.
Reason #2: Rust! CDNs! Modern things!
I got my feet wet with Rust when I was at Shopify, working with teams responsible for compiling Liquid templates into WebAssembly Text and rendering them as bytecode at the edge.
I think Rust is really neat. It's a systems language that's not so scary yet feels powerful to a JavaScript-focused web developer like me. I bet there's even more we could do in that space on the Tailwind CSS team.
I was also dreaming of a CDN-powered Tailwind CSS when chatting with developers on the theme platform team at Shopify. Since Shopify prefers a no-build approach to themes, having a version of Tailwind CSS that could be served from a CDN in a performant way would have been awesome.
OK, that's it
I'd love to chat more with you fine folks. You know where to reach me: jplhomer@gmail.com and jplhomer pretty much anywhere else, like GitHub, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
✌️