Blake Ball

Engineer · Austin, Texas

Front end leader with a design degree and sixteen years shipping software, from IBM's cloud dashboards to a component library four production apps run on. Comfortable owning the whole path: schema and caching underneath, tokens and type on top, and the argument with design in the middle.

Skills

Languages
TypeScript · JavaScript · SQL · HTML · CSS
Front end
React 19 · Next.js App Router · React Server Components · TanStack Query · Redux · Zustand · Angular
Styling
Tailwind CSS v4 · Design tokens · Cascade layers · Sass
Back end and data
Node.js · Postgres · Supabase · GraphQL · Apollo · Redis
Testing
Vitest · Playwright · Storybook · Jest · Cypress
Design
Figma · Adobe CS · Typography · Accessibility

Experience

  1. Revmatics

    Jan 2025 – Present · 1 yr 7 mos
    Lead Front End Engineer

    Leading the front end.

  2. findhelp

    Jan 2024 – Jan 2025 · 1 yr
    Senior Staff Engineer

    Social care software, at the staff level.

  3. Cart.com

    Oct 2021 – Nov 2023 · 2 yrs 1 mo
    Lead Front End Engineer · Feb 2023 – Nov 2023Senior Front End Engineer · Oct 2021 – Feb 2023
    • Led the front end for Unified Analytics, surfacing AI-driven visualizations and optimization suggestions to brands.
    • Built a reusable shared UI component library adopted by several teams across the company.
    • Worked every phase, from roadmap planning with product and design through implementation and support.
    • Mentored junior developers.
    • TypeScript, React, Apollo, GraphQL, Auth0, Tailwind, Material UI, Playwright, Jest, Tableau, Nivo.

  4. Moblize

    Apr 2020 – Oct 2021 · 1 yr 6 mos
    Software Engineer
    • Built real-time data visualization for oil drilling operators, including anonymized comparison against competitors' wells.
    • Maintained the front end of two major repositories through an ongoing AngularJS to modern Angular migration.

  5. The Karis Group

    Jul 2019 – Apr 2020 · 9 mos
    Senior Software Engineer
    • Built a member services portal in React and Apollo GraphQL to automate medical bill renegotiation.
    • Wrote a system that recursively maps a nested JSON object to form inputs and writes user input back, to pre-populate PDF forms.
    • Integrated Auth0 into the front end applications.
    • Mentored junior developers.

  6. IBM

    Dec 2013 – Jul 2019 · 5 yrs 7 mos
    Staff Software Engineer
    • Contributed to the IBM Cloud developer experience dashboard in React and Redux.
    • Developed native Android applications for the IBM ReadyApp program and IBM CSync.
    • Contributed to and maintained the IBM Watson Android and Java SDKs, resolving public repo issues and converting the Java SDK from Maven to Gradle.
    • Built nested web views in AngularJS and D3 for native Android and iOS apps.
    • Implemented the IBM Mobile Innovation Lab site from scratch as a CMS on Node.js, MongoDB, and Keystone.js.

  7. TAVHealth

    Sep 2012 – Nov 2013 · 1 yr 2 mos
    Developer
    • Built a web application on Groovy on Grails for hospital employees tracking outpatients.
    • Implemented Bootstrap, custom CSS, and jQuery; customized a PHP-based Sugar CRM.

  8. AllClear ID

    Nov 2010 – Aug 2012 · 1 yr 9 mos
    Web Developer
    • Recreated the majority of the company's PHP site during a corporate rebrand.
    • Maintained distinct consumer and corporate designs, and started the internal style guide.
    • Worked directly from designers' files and introduced HTML5 to the Java engineers.

Selected work

Game Verdict
Controller, or keyboard and mouse? gameverdict.app
Roster
The library this site is made of. @blakesteve/roster
Retrospect
Your music taste vs. the actual sky. retrospect-seven.vercel.app
MegaSquad
Pick'ems for your friend group. megasquad.org

Education

Texas State University

Dec 2008 · Cum laude

BFA, Communication Design