Hello👋,
I'm Christian Valdez
Software Engineer
About Me
Back in 2011, I decided to enroll in my high school's introductory computer science class. Fast-forward to today, and I've had the privilege of building software for a start-up and a government agency. My main focus these days is building full stack web applications. I most enjoy building software in the sweet spot where design and engineering meet — things that look good but are also built well under the hood. When I'm away from my keyboard, I'm usually hiking, reading, and taking care of my cats.
Experience
May 2021 - August 2024
Software Engineer II·Chatmeter
- Led project to overhaul the survey creator tool, including integrating generative AI prompt to generate a survey, increasing user engagement by 30%.
- Led image optimizer project and reduced image upload failures among providers such as Google & Yelp by 60%.
- Reduced post failures by 80% by overhauling social media post publisher tool to create a more engaging and user-friendly experience.
- Optimized the post-queuing system to improve reliability and efficiency when publishing to multiple social media platforms, leveraging Scala and the Play framework.
- Reduced operation costs by 75% by developing an in-house solution for directory location pages with Astro.
- Migrated legacy AngularJS pages to functional React components, leveraging TypeScript for improved type safety, maintainability, and scalability.
- Led Agile stand-up meetings, facilitated team collaboration, and addressed blockers to ensure timely delivery of SaaS products.
- React
- Scala
- Play
- Bootstrap
- SCSS
- MongoDB
- AWS
April 2019 - May 2021
Software Engineer·NAVFAC
- Reverse-engineered legacy applications to modern full stack applications using Vue.js, Spring Boot, and PostgreSQL to reduce technical debt and increase maintainability.
- Developed 5 core RESTful microservice APIs using Java, Spring Boot, and PostgreSQL to enhance scalability.
- Built Jenkins CI/CD pipelines, automated the creation of Docker containers, performing security scans on dependencies, automating tests, and deploying to AKS within Azure.
- Vue.js
- Javascript
- Java
- Spring Boot
- PostgreSQL
- Azure
- Jenkins
April 2019 - May 2021
IT Support Specialist·SDSU Research Foundation
- Maintained organization Wordpress website with 5000 average visitors, ensuring security and relevance of content.
- Wordpress
Projects
Twitter Clone
My Portfolio!
This very website you're on right now! Oringinally I built it with just HTML, CSS, and some Javascript, but later I converted it over to a Vue.js project. However I wanted to benefit from SEO and have faster static rendering, so I decided to convert it to a Next.js site instead. I also setup a Github Action that builds and deploys my portfolio when I push changes to my main branch.
Coffee Tracker
A Coffee Tracker app made with React that utilizes the Yelp API to fetch coffee places based on a given location and help you find the best coffe shop near you. The user can see their rating, and address to the restaurant/cafe. It utilizes Netlify serverless functions in order to talk to the Yelp API.
Ice Cream BMS
This buisness management website was created as part of a school project. It was first built with Bootstrap, PHP, and MySQL, it featured crud operations on various tables and custom validation. It was hosted on a DigitalOcean droplet using Nginx as it's web server. Recently I converted it over to be a React app using firebase as it's backend and hosted on Netlify.
