About Ken Walton

For the last 5 years, I've worked as a front-end developer at Stanley Black & Decker on websites and applications for Craftsman, Dewalt, Irwin, Lennox, Stanley, Black + Decker, Porter Cable, Bostitch, Mac Tools, and Proto Industrial.

What are my technical skills?

  • Markup: HTML, Handlebars, Mustache, Pug, doT.JS
  • Client-Side Logic: JavaScript, jQuery, Knockout, React, Vue, Webpack
  • Styling: CSS, Sass, Less
  • Version Control: Git, Team Foundation Server, Azure DevOps
  • Content Management: Sitecore, SharePoint
  • Package Manager: NPM
  • IDE: Visual Studio
  • Task Runners: Grunt, Gulp
  • Testing: Jest
  • Frameworks: Bootstrap, Reactstrap
  • Debugging: Fiddler, browser dev tools
  • Design: Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign
  • Documentation and Tracking: Jira, Confluence, Azure DevOps
  • Accessibility: Siteimprove

What do I do at work?

In IT, there are 2 sides of application services, build and run. I am on the build side, which is developing new sites and applications. I lead, mentor and work as a hands-on developer alongside a team of front-end developers, largely off-shore contractors using a staff augmentation model, to develop modular, reusable code.

Our tooling consists of Gulp as a task runner, Handlebars or Pug for HTML templating, lazy-loading JavaScript delivered using Webpack, CSS written with SASS, with code repositories in GIT. I understand how build and delivery pipelines work as we work with Azure DevOps.

I started on the run side which helped me learn the basics of software development in an enterpise level environment. I learned to structure code to scale and be reusable, how to trouble shoot tricky JavaScript errors from dev instances to production environments, the concepts of continuous integration and continuous delivery and working in an Agile environment performing maintenance and enhancement work.

Maintenance is things like bug fixes, accessibility issues and other small tweaks. Enhancement work is adding new features or significant rewrites of an existing feature. Some of the most fun I had was working with our back-end developers on website enhancements. A few of those back-end devs were excellent teachers which contributed to my education as a developer.

What about before I became a front-end developer?

For ten years prior to becoming a front-end developer, I had worked in educational publishing, specializing in the K–12 educational market on both interactive and print projects. Going back even further, I designed catalogs, e-mail campaigns, and websites after getting my start in the advertising specialty business.