What I'm looking for next

Hi, I'm Mandy 👋

I'm a frontend-focused software engineer, and I'm starting to look for my next role. This post is partly a heads-up that I'm on the market, and partly an honest description of the kind of work that brings out my best. If any of it sounds like your team, I'd love to talk.

A little about me

I've spent the last four-plus years building and shipping production web and mobile apps in React, React Native, TypeScript, Remix/React Router, and Next.js. Right now I'm at Virtu Studios, where I build our flagship product and ship client work across web and mobile, including engagements with companies like Dell.

I like owning work end to end. I'm comfortable taking something from a rough idea through technical approach, architecture, and release, and I want to understand why we're building a thing, not just be handed a ticket and asked to close it.

My background is a little unusual for a developer. Before I wrote code professionally, I spent a decade doing project-based work across museums and archives, and I came into engineering through UX research and library science. That history shows up in how I work: I care about the people on the other side of the screen, and I tend to ask "what is this actually for?" before I ask "how do I build it?"

The kind of team I do my best work on

Here's the honest version of what I'm looking for.

A small team. I do my best work when I can see the whole shape of a product and know the people I'm building it with. Small teams move fast, trust each other, and let one person have real ownership over something that matters. That's where I thrive. I love to collaborate with my team.

High impact. I'd rather build one thing that genuinely changes the experience for users than ship a dozen features nobody asked for. I want my work to matter, and I want to be close enough to the product to know whether it actually did.

Space to think deeply. Good frontend work isn't just typing fast. The interesting problems live in the details of how something feels to use, and those details deserve real attention. I want room to think a problem through, not just react to the next thing in the queue.

Room to make data-informed decisions. I like grounding choices in evidence. That comes partly from my UX research roots: I've designed and run user-research protocols, synthesized findings into recommendations, and I'm comfortable with A/B testing and analytics. The goal is always the same, which is building the best possible experience for the people who use the thing. I'd rather know than guess.

What I bring

A few things I'm genuinely proud of, in case they're useful:

I've shipped real products solo, across web, iOS, and Android. A public digital archive I founded and built (Black Mountain College Yearbook) was acquired by a museum in 2024. I've built and launched apps like Owen (pet health records on iOS and Android) and Bramble (a wildlife rehab patient tracker) on my own, design and code. All of these projects are on my site, go poke around!

I care about accessibility. At Jenzabar I started and led an accessibility working group, got us to WCAG compliance, and baked inclusive design into how the team worked.

I'm comfortable with managing initiatives and projects. At Sports Card Investor I led a cross-platform tech-debt initiative end to end: scoped it, sequenced the work, managed the team's workload, and reported progress up to executive sponsors.

I like cleaning things up. During one refactor I cut code complexity by around 70 percent, which made the app faster and the team quicker.

Want to chat more?

If you're a small team building something you care about, and you want someone who can own frontend work, think carefully about the user experience, and back decisions with data, I'd genuinely love to hear from you. I'm ready to start a conversation about joining your team.

The fastest way to reach me is email at mandyhartmandev@gmail.com

Thanks for reading. Let's build something together!