Scott Spence

Scott Spence

Senior Developer & Community Leader

Email address
[email protected]
Phone number
+44 0000 00 0000

Seasoned developer with about 19 years of experience in the tech industry.

Expertise spans JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, and JavaScript frameworks with over 8 years years of hands-on experience.

Holds almost 7 years years of commercial experience in development teams, delivering projects across various frameworks like Svelte and React.

Previous career of over 12 years as a senior-level Analyst Developer, focusing on Microsoft Office automation for large financial organisations.

In addition to technical skills, a proven track record in leadership and advocacy roles. Passionate about using modern technology and continually keen to improve existing skills and learn new ones.

Location: UK (Swanley, Kent)

Engineering Team Lead

XtendOps
Sep 2023 - Present (1yr 4mos)

Summary

Technical leader overseeing a sophisticated SvelteKit monorepo ecosystem powering multiple customer-facing applications. Primary architect for core infrastructure decisions and technical standards, while mentoring and growing engineering teams across multiple product areas. Responsible for code quality, security standards, and technical architecture decisions across the platform, driving both team excellence and product innovation through hands-on leadership and strategic technical planning.

Highlights

Leading development teams across Customer Portal (8 developers) and Smart Agent (4 developers) projects in a Svelte monorepo environment, focusing on technical excellence and team growth

Architected and maintained a comprehensive UI component package used across multiple applications, including development of a showcase application for component documentation and usage examples

Spearheaded significant infrastructure improvements including implementation of Vercel CLI in GitHub workflows, resulting in optimized build times and deployment efficiency

Architected and implementing Trigger.dev integration for handling long-running processes, improving platform reliability and time-to-detection for critical issues

Established robust code review processes as monorepo code owner, implementing Svelte best practices and security standards across all projects

Driving continuous improvement through bi-weekly one-on-ones, strategic project allocation for skill development, and regular knowledge sharing sessions

Leading technical initiatives including SDK adapter streamlining, agent builder improvements, and preparation for Svelte 5 migration

Consultant

OES Technology
Apr 2021 - Present (3yrs 8mos)

Summary

Team lead and developer advocate that has played significant roles in increasing best practices, visibility and adoption of clients platforms.

A Svelte ambassador, organising monthly Svelte Society London events for about 3 years now.

International conference speaker. Workshop host (in person and remote).

Continually nurturing and building relationships with community and industry leaders. A demonstrable deep commitment to educating and supporting the Svelte community.

Developer Relations Engineer

Storyblok
Aug 2022 - Aug 2023 (1yr)

Summary

Helping enterprise customers to understand and get value out of Storyblok in workshops, tutorials, and customer demos.

Write sample applications, prototypes, and code samples to showcase the power and flexibility of Storyblok and the headless approach to content management.

Help external developers to overcome missing functionalities or technical issues by using plugins, tools, apps, or custom scripts.

Contribute code updates and bug fixes to Storyblok’s public projects (e.g. SDKs, sample applications, starter kits).

Highlights

Building with SvelteKit, main stage at Connect Tech 2022, Atlanta.

Svelte Summit Fall 2022, Sweden.

Developer Advocate

GraphCMS
Apr 2021 - Jul 2022 (1yr 3mos)

Summary

Content creation in the form of blog posts, workshops and educational videos.

Coordinating meet-up events and conference talks to gather and energise users.

Creating and maintaining partnerships with community and industry leaders.

Gathering feedback from community and end-users to communicate with product development to improve product designs.

Highlights

Jamstack Conf 2021 Workshop, “Build with SvelteKit and GraphQL” build a fast secure project that uses SvelteKit’s features.

Jamstack Explorers Mission: ”Building with SvelteKit and GraphCMS“.

Recorded 26 getting started videos for the GraphCMS examples repo on GitHub.

Deep dives on getting started with SvelteKit and Data Binding with Svelte.

Web Developer

Karmarama
Sep 2018 - Apr 2021 (2yrs 7mos)

Summary

Web Developer working in the Creative Products section of Karmarama. Working on varied projects. Mainly front end with React.

Team DevOps. As the longest serving member of the Web Team overseeing deployments of the majority of projects hosted internally. This was using a mixture of old Ubuntu servers (v16) and Rackspace servers (v18).

Highlights

Built internal Pinstagram used for onboarding and pitch books where staff at Karmarama share articles seen as good, PR, Production, Marketing, etc. Built with NextJS, Prisma (GraphQL data layer) and GraphQL Yoga (Express).

Evangelised the use of Gatsby in the team for sites that did not need a lot of user generated content.

One of the first projects (client design system) to use MDX with Gatsby.

Created a client PWA with Preact using Lottie animations provided by in house illustrator.

Worked on custom built CMS for client using vanilla React.

Front-End Developer

Zaizi
Mar 2018 - Aug 2018 (5mos)

Summary

Worked in agile teams to develop new user-facing features. Using best practices to create front end applications. Using JavaScript frameworks such as React and Gatsby and styling with styled-components 💅

Highlights

Evaluate several CMS’ for use, Contentful, GraphCMS and CrafterCMS

Working in an agile team in the delivery of initial sprints of the ncsc.gov.uk site.

Interests

Mechanical keyboards, a never ending rabbit hole!

Writing how-to’s and guides on scottspence.com.

Watching YouTube videos on mechanical engineering and restorations.

Massive Drum and Bass fan!