Nice to meet you! I'm Tylus Dawkins.

I'm a FullStack Engineer with a focus on user experience. I have experience in JavaScript/TypeScript and many of their common libraries for both Frontend and Backend work.

🌱 I was born and raised in Las Vegas, NV

⚡ Most recently, I have been an Engineer for Liberty Mutual and have been practicing Full Stack Engineering for nearly two years

💁: Before becoming a Software Engineer I worked in the insurance space working in contact centers, I spent time as an agent, a mentor/Nesting coach, and a Trainer/Learning Specialist.

Team Oriented: It is my goal to make sure that all of my associates have the tools and support to thrive in their jobs.

Collaboration: I believe all of our best work is done in conjunction with others

Transparency: It is impossible to work with others if you're not open and honest.

Integrity: Results are driven by well intenioned actions

           

I am proficient in several other languages/frameworks such as Python's Django, TypeScript's Angular, Vue.JS and more, but the above are my preferred languages.

I have on many occasions demonstrated being a fast learner, in my most recent role, I started a new task in my first full sprint, working in AWS Lex, a technology previously unknown to me. Through reading documentation and researching existing code I released a fully tested production-ready feature. This included learning about AWS Cloud Formation Templates, AWS Lex intents, slots, utterances, and internally made testing suites for the chat bot. My team was very impressed with my independence and how quickly I delivered the feature.

This is a short collection of a few of the things I have worked on. Most of my best work has been done professionally on proprietary software I cannot share here, but here are a few of the things I have worked on in-between.

This is probably my most interesting project to talk about as it is truly the most learning I have done in the fewest days. I worked on this as part of a 4-day group hackathon for our onboarding with Liberty Mutual, there were a total of 4 of us, two on the frontend, and two on the backend, I worked on the frontend. This was my first time working with charts, I decided to learn Charts.JS while the others worked on either mocking data, setting up Models, Views, and controllers, or figuring out how to style the app. I had to stretch my knowledge of React, this is where I learned exactly why understanding that setState runs async, that it uses reference equation, and how to use helper functions within the frame of state manipulation was so important. One of the more fun challenges I had with this project was the loss of the backend, I could not possibly run the backend code for a public deployment, as the dependancies were in a library specific to LM's ecosystem, so I had to write a utility to come up with hundreds of randomized contacts so I could deploy this as a portfolio piece. If I were to re-write it now, I wouldn't change much honestly, the code needs cleaning, it's hard to read, and some functions could be condensed or combined, but I'm pretty proud of the work for only having had little less than 4 days to write it.

https://tylus-dawkins-ist.netlify.app

This is a project that I have been building as part of a family project, it is currently on hold, and thus development has stopped on it, it's certainly not my best or prettiest work but it still details an interesting part of my journey. Originally I built this out in plain ol' React, since first starting development it became abundantly clear that React on its own was not well suited for this sort of project, with plans for hundreds of images to be rendered at a time, as well as the expanding tech debt that is development in base react, I felt that using a SSR framework was a must and that it would make the development experience much better if I could write API routes within the same project. Thus I converted all of my react Syntax to Next syntax and learned how to develop in Next. Like I mentioned earlier, it's not super pretty, it's also not incredibly technical, but I learned how to incorporate express functionalities into Next components. Now, it is worth mentioning that this is a full-stack app with an admin dashboard in the background, I have implemented full-crud into this.

https://dmj-next-test.vercel.app/home/design-board

I built this as an idea I had for a little known game called "Dungeons and Dragons". See I am a big fan of DnD, however there is one big barrier to playing it, getting a table of people together. So I wanted to think of a system that could allow for a DnD like experience that one could play on their own, and thus I took inspiration from roguelike games, as they are typically highly re-playable as most of them feature randomized combat abilities. Background aside, this project has been a little bit of a test in terms of logic, but mostly an exercise in UI/UX. Because the app is so simple, it needed to look and feel good in order for it to capture attention and retain users. In order to give the page some pop! I have implemented some hover animations to make the webpage interactable, I have paid extra attention to having lots of accents, and complimentary background while also trying to make sure there's not too much noise. Overall I'm really proud of this project, I think it is very pretty.

https://5e-rogue-like.netlify.app