I'm Maria 👋
I build beautiful, responsive, and accessible web products
I'm a frontend engineer with a product-focused mindset, dedicated to creating seamless user experiences. I'm not currently in the market for a new role, but I'm always happy to connect with folks in the industry.
About
With several years of dedicated web development experience, I've had the privilege of serving a variety of users and business needs. I love crafting delightful and intuitive web interfaces, which drives me to excel in delivering user-facing solutions.
I recently joined Yahoo as a Senior Software Engineer to help build some exciting new tools for content creators. Prior to this I worked at Vox Media, where I played a key role in improving editorial workflows by contributing to a proprietary CMS that powers renowned sites like The Verge and Vox.
My journey also includes roles as a Software Engineer at Beatport, the global hub of electronic music, and at Havenly, a dynamic interior design and e-commerce startup. Prior to my tech career, I developed valuable leadership and communication skills during my time as a program manager in higher education.
Based in Denver, I share my life with my husband and energetic toddler son. Beyond my family and career, my interests include fitness and the occasional nature hike.
Skills
These are the languages, tools, and techniques I use most frequently. However, I'm always interested in learning new skills and selecting the optimal tools for each task.
- JavaScript
- React
- Vue
- HTML
- CSS
- Sass
- Responsive Design
- Web Accessibility
- Unit Testing
- Frontend Development
- Fullstack Development
- CLI
- Git
- Docker
Projects
Dashboard and Saved Search
I worked on refactoring Vox Media's story editor app from a legacy frontend framework (Ractive) into a modern one (Vue). The first part of this was the dashboard re-write, which also introduced an enhanced search experience and "saved searches" — a way to save specific queries. This project reduced page load times by 50% and allowed users to conduct more granular searches. It also helped lay the ground work for additional refactor projects over a period of two years to bring the app up to modern standards.
Quickposts
A new audience platform, created for The Verge's redesign, required added tools to manage certain layout and content formats. One of these new formats is known as Quickposts, which feeds into the Storystream seen on The Verge's home page. For this project, I worked on the Quickposts UI within the story editor, adding features like image uploads, publishing, and grouping. This allowed editorial users to save time by quickly drafting and publishing posts to the Storystream, which has been described by some writers as "blogging to the homepage".
Eater Maps
A special Chorus story type known as "mapstacks" is mainly used by Eater sites to create curated guides. For this project I worked on a new UI integrated with Mapbox, Foursquare, and OpenTable, with the goal of helping writers save time and better manage centralized restaurant metadata. One highlight of this project was working with Vue transition animations to handle expanding and shrinking map point cards when switching between the edit and reorder views. I also created an animated draggable list component for the reorder view using the Drag and Drop API.