Jack Chen

Head of Front End Web Development

Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

About

I see myself foremost as a front-end engineer with a keen interest and appreciation for Design and UX. Over the course of my career I have worked for organizations of all shape and sizes ranging from Telecommunications companies, e-commerce, entertainment startups, Government corporations, digital agencies and large media companies. I have led teams of diverse developers in all walks of life. Obtaining significant experience in setting up and managing both onshore and offshore development teams, at times from scratch. Running my own website consulting business working with various clients has given me exposure to industries which I have never came across in my company roles, such as membership systems, hospitality and medical industries each with their own unique quirks when it comes to product development. My eventual goal is to evolve my business to become a platform which can provide affordable and easy to manage online presence for all small businesses.

Experience

  • News Corp Australia (Full-time · 7 yrs 7 mos)
    • Head of Front-End Web Development
      Aug 2024 - Present · 1 yr 11 mos

      Responsible for news.com.au, The Australian, All lifestyle sites such as escape.com.au and body and soul, Metro and Regional Mastheads, Codesports, skynews.com.au

    • Head of Front-End Development - Metros, Regionals and Sport
      Mar 2022 - Aug 2024 · 2 yrs 6 mos

      Responsible for Metro and Regional Mastheads and Codesports

    • Tech Lead Metros
      Dec 2018 - Mar 2022 · 3 yrs 4 mos

  • Front-end engineer - Contract at Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)
    Oct 2014 - Dec 2018 · 4 yrs 3 mos

    Constructed Freemarker front-end templates for core media CMS that will be used across a majority number of ABC Departments. Refactored front-end components build on top of Bootstrap, Jquery Widgets and Sass so that components can be easily extended and modified. Working closely with UX to setup pattern library and baseline skinning framework across both responsive and mobile specific templates.

  • Co-Founder at Netoss
    Jun 2011 - Dec 2018 · 7 yrs 7 mos

    Netoss is a creative and development agency, where we work closely with our clients to develop web-based products for a range of plateforms including desktops, smart phones, and tablets utilizing cutting edge technologies build upon simple but elegant principals.

  • Front-End Developer at iPowow
    Mar 2013 - Oct 2014 · 1 yr 8 mos

    Worked on cutting edge realtime cross platform voting application capable of processing thousands of votes per second build on SASS, Backbone.js, require.js, node.js and grunt. Optimised Javascript, Sass to expose certain extendible presentation layer that can be easily customised by designers which frees up developers' time for the development of new product features. Integration with various 3rd party APIs such as twitter, Facebook, jwplayer, Gigya to enrich the experience of the voting app as well as monetizing the platform.

  • Vodafone Hutchison Australia (3 yrs 1 mo)
    • Senior Front-end engineer
      Apr 2012 - Mar 2013 · 1 yr

      Creation of new mobile templates and ensuring the new front-end framework is flexible and compatible with existing CMS modules and doesn’t add overhead to existing new page creation process. VHA Blog and VHA Home website performance analysis. Setting front-end recommendations in terms of http requests, page size and image optimization. Vendor management, working with vendors to ensure the quality of the work during hand over follows VHA quality standards as well as assisting vendor in making sure they solution is compatible with existing VHA platforms. Conduct weekly code review sessions with the dev team to ensure cross skill training, code quality consistency across the team as well giving the team a chance to show off their work and be generally excited in what we do. Involved with the creation of front-end development guidelines, UX and design handover guidelines, VHA vendor coding standards documentations to ensure same consistency in work produced internally and externally.

    • Online Developer
      Mar 2010 - Nov 2012 · 2 yrs 9 mos

      ---------------------------------- What I did and also currently doing Responsible for the front-end architect on the Vodafone unified CMS project. Ensure that the pages produced from Fatwire CMS are flexible, maintainable, SEO friendly, accessible with a strong emphasis on page performance and page weight. Create responsive design page templates so that a page template coded on a single code source can be rendered correctly both on a smart phone and desktop. Developed page templates for vodafone.com.au which drives various Vodafone campaigns with varying needs. These projects presented me with opportunities to work on different external APIs such as Twitter and Sportal feeds. Setting up and maintaining development servers on virtual machines, installing and configuring SVN and Wiki for my development team so that we all have a standard of sharing our work, sharing code and sharing documents. Maintain and development for the Vodafone intranet site as well as integration with internal tools. Developed various forms and modules to cater for the various needs of the internal communications team and online teams.