I build interfaces for everyone, of all abilities and backgrounds.
Contact me: jesse.r.beach at gmail dot com
Engineering Manager / Software Engineer, Specialist in Accessibility, Meta (Facebook)
– present
Built the Quality Programs Engineering team at Meta. This group of engineers -- between 10 and 18 over 3 years -- has invented several new internal tools that measure usability and accessibility support at scale on iOS, Android and Web.
As a manager, I prioritize care and support for my direct reports, as well as diversity of thought and person.
Supported several major App-level efforts as an engineering manager, such as right-to-left language support in the Facebook App and Dark Mode support on Android and iOS.
Managed the tooling and program for the Facebook App Bug SLA for 2.5 years before shifting the program to owners better aligned with operational tooling.
Fostered the establishment of satellite accessibility teams across the company in Instagram, Whatsapp and Messenger.
Developed axobject-query, which provides programmatic access to the browser Accessibility Object Model in Node/NPM environments.
Made significant contributions to the eslint-plugin-jsx-a11y project. This project statically analyzes JSX for accessibility patterns that violate best practice. I eliminated over 2,000 violations in the FB codebase via codemodding using the results of this plugin.
Labelled over 800 user interface elements via programmatic, scripted fixes.
Started at Backupify which was acquired by Datto in December 2014.
In the first two months, I consolidated the client-side resources of a sprawling, legacy Rails/Angular application down to single manifests. This work allowed us to then undertake UI and branding improvements in hours and not weeks with no fear of unknown side-effects. Prior to this I had never worked with Angular or Rails.
Bolted a newly-developed and backwards incompatible backend service platform in to the existing client application while maintaining a consistent user experience.
Increased test coverage from about 100 specs to over 700 specs on new and existing resources.
Isolated generic UI components into a style guide repository that the design team uses to prototype and that the application uses as a component resource origin.
Quail was born as an open-source, in-browser jQuery plugin. My first project converted the core testing components into encapsulated classes with an event-driven run time structure and test coverage. This allowed us to run asynchronous operations.
In November 2013, I partnered the project with the Kwaliteits Institut Nederlandse Gemeenten for a year long engagement to integrate Quail into their quality assurance platform. In December 2014 I traveled to Den Haag for a week to wrap up the project.
On July 17, 2014, I spoke at the FCC's Accessing Social Media (from minute 219:45) event about the accessibility considerations of building content editing tools.
Quail is evolving into a tool for front end developers to incorpate into their continuous integration toolchains to ensure consistent and verifiable accessibility guideline compliance in their applications.
Joined the Drupal Sparkteam, sub-team of the Office of the CTO, as a CSS/JS specialist.
Restructured the base themes available through the Theme Builder on Drupal Gardens using object-oriented CSS design patterns and a custom flexible gridding system.
Rethemed the front-door experience of Drupal Gardens employing cutting-edge CSS techniques.
You are great at explaining how things work in many different ways and that really helped get the ideas across. Hopefully we'll get to have you as a teacher again!
Promoted from Interaction Designer, to User Experience Lead to Lead of Front End Development in 20 months.
Rationalized a shoot-from-the-hip, emergency-based development process into a structured project plan that modeled content, sales, engineering, front end and quality assurance tasks in Microsoft Project.
Revitalized a 1.5 year stalled effort to build a template publishing foundation and brought it to release in under 3 months. The publishing foundation cut development time of onboarded projects from 10 days to 5 and eliminated endemic maintenance issues.
Championed widget development and insisted that they be built in HTML ensuring a clean integration with host pages despite the technical challenges faced with this path.
Lead the integration designs for over 35 web sites, including Newsweek search, Fox News, Associated Press and Bob Villa.
Usability Consultant, Center for Innovation in Assessment, Indiana University, May 2007 to August 2007. Delivered design improvements for existing web sites based on short, focused usability studies with representative stakeholders. Improvements included UI alterations and information architecture changes.
Interaction Designer, Co-Founder, BigTreeTop Company
May 2006 – December 2007
Architected the information design of the BigTreeTop platform from data gathered on customer observation sessions.
Built out the web page structure of the BigTreeTop customer facing system over numerous iterations in collaboration with the contracted development team and visual design firm.
Collaborated with a senior designer on the design of Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g's target update management system. I focused on function label names and the task flow of reassigning updates from testing targets to production targets.
Repurposed an existing HTML/JavaScript menu prototype into five design variants. Tested three of the menu variants in a quick one-day study with 8 Oracle database end-users in the Usability Lab. Used the performance data to restrict the decision criteria and aid in the selection of a final menu design.
Education
M.S., Human-Computer Interaction Design, Indiana University-Bloomington, May 2007, GPA 3.97
B.A., Linguistics, Dartmouth College, June 2004, GPA 3.81 (Magna cum Laude & Phi Beta Kappa)
French language and culture, Institut Lumière Lyon II, Lyon, France 2005; Joigny, France 2002
Chinese language and contemporary culture, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China 2001
German language and philosophy, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Schule, Weinheim, Germany 1998
