Jens Oliver Meiert

Berufsbildende Schulen Varel

University of Hamburg

FernUniversität in Hagen

Engineering lead and author (“The Web Development Glossary”, “Upgrade Your HTML”)

Greater Hamburg Area

Miro

Engineering Manager (Accessibility)

I’ve written the following O’Reilly books:

-  The Little Book of Website Quality Control (2016)
-  The Little Book of HTML/CSS Coding Guidelines (2015)
-  The Little Book of HTML/CSS Frameworks (2015)
-  Webdesign mit CSS, 2nd Edition (2007)
-  Webdesign mit CSS (2005)

Additionally, I’ve reviewed the following titles (list may not be complete):

-  Mezzalira: Building Micro-Frontends (2021)
-  Wendel: Designing for Behavior Change (2020)
-  Yablonski: Laws of UX (2019)
-  Schmitt: CSS Kochbuch, 3rd Edition (2012)
-  Niederst Robbins: Webdesign mit (X)HTML und CSS (2008)
-  Schmitt: CSS Kochbuch, 2nd Edition (2007)
-  Freeman & Freeman: HTML mit CSS & XHTML von Kopf bis Fuß (2006)
-  Schmitt: CSS Kochbuch (2005)
-  Meyer: CSS – kurz & gut (2005)
            

    
    

    
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O'Reilly Media

Technical Reviewer and Author

Sample responsibilities and accomplishments:

During a challenging time for LivePerson, I rebuilt LivePerson’s Developer Experience (DX) team, starting with two cross-functional full-time employees.

Building from scratch as with previous teams, I laid the foundation for efficient and effective operation, ranging from team logistics to team events to team goals.

Despite constraints and limitations, we improved LivePerson’s heart of DX, the LivePerson Developer Center (<a href="http://developers.liveperson.com">developers.liveperson.com</a>) on literally every dimension.

This included some new and much corrected content, new site features (for example, to indicate up-to-dateness and to allow syndication), social media and search engine optimization, as well as implementation of good engineering practices (as with automated dependency management, significant improvements in output quality—conformance—, and a large-scale reduction of technical debt). This work soon not only led to a better experience (including a performance boost of 33%, when bringing average load time down from 3 to 2 seconds), but also to faster maintenance.

Groundwork with the team also included research of other past and disbanded DX initiatives, identification of more than 100 content owners, forging relationships with stakeholders, and planning needed features and improvements for the next three years.

One other characteristic of the role—and, given career aspirations as a senior engineering lead, a sign of commitment to the organization—was a great range of high- and low-level work. While working with stakeholders on putting DX on a solid foundation, and planning priorities for the long-term, I was also coaching and actively working with the team on specific improvements to DX infrastructure. I.e., the work in DX came with many hands-on opportunities to “walk the talk,” and to lead by example.
            

    
    

    
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LivePerson

Engineering Manager (Developer Experience)

Sample responsibilities and accomplishments:

I founded LivePerson’s Data Protection and Privacy team, where I managed up to four full-time backend engineers, with hiring completed for a fifth engineer.

Responsibilities of the team included several libraries and microservices related to encryption (AES-256, mTLS) and compliance (GDPR), as well as microservices related to LivePerson account creation.

Given that the team hadn’t existed before, one part of my work consisted of laying the foundation—including defining vision, mission, and goals in coordination with stakeholders, and setting up logistics, processes, and events—, and ensuring efficient and effective operation of the team.

Our work on the team was influenced by a number of challenges the wider LivePerson Engineering organization faced, and therefore a great part of the team’s work related to the respective Engineering-wide initiatives. It was also necessary to refactor the services we had inherited, making for some of the team’s own challenges, but also successes (for example, with automated dependency management, nearly doubled test coverage, reduced technical debt, and stability approaching 100%).

As part of a wider LivePerson reorg (which I could contribute to to some degree), the team was dissolved in an amicable fashion, with me having the opportunity to start LivePerson’s new Developer Experience program (see details for next LivePerson position).

During my time leading DPP, I contributed to LivePerson’s Engineering hiring as well as several Engineering initiatives (for example, around deployment efficiency). I was also a member of LivePerson’s Engineering-wide call leader rotation.
            

    
    

    
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Engineering Manager (Data Protection and Privacy)

Sample responsibilities and accomplishments:

I founded Jimdo’s Marketing Tooling team, where I managed and developed up to six full-time employees, as well as external engineers. I aligned the team mission, set up a team vision, and established processes and logistics (including Kanban for work organization, OKR for goal management, and KPIs and snippets for reporting).

Work with the team included close collaboration with an embedded Marketing project manager as well as a data analyst. It involved maintaining close relationships with the VP of Engineering and, later, one of the Heads of Engineering; the VPs of Brand and Performance Marketing as well as their team leads; Jimdo’s Engineering leads; and key stakeholders from Data and Legal.

During my tenure we decreased the technical debt the team had inherited from the start, and significantly increased the scope and output of our responsibilities, going beyond <a href="http://jimdo.com">jimdo.com</a>. Part of these responsibilities was Jimdo’s successful 2020/2021 rebranding, for which I was the Engineering lead.

Apart from hiring for the Marketing Tooling team, I was a large contributor to Jimdo’s Engineering hiring in general.

For Jimdo Engineering I also ran the Engineering Communication program, which included restarting and driving Jimdo’s Engineering presence on Twitter (@JimdoDev), was a co-lead for the Engineering competency framework, and wrote and implemented several technical and operational concepts.
            

    
    

    
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Jimdo

Engineering Manager (Marketing Tooling)

Sample responsibilities and accomplishments:

Extending the original role I took on extra responsibility strengthening both sum.cumo web development and communications.

For web development I led or assisted developing and improving client projects, built internal and external efficiency tools, extended automation and code quality control, and prepared a long-term frontend strategy supporting other frontend leads.

For communications I set up and managed the sum.cumo blog and its editorial agenda, helped organize and guide the communications team, set up and managed sum.cumo’s open source program (<a href="http://github.com/sumcumo">github.com/sumcumo</a>), and through these and other efforts 1) increased sum.cumo’s public visibility and 2) reduced recruiting cost (notably for developer roles).

On a corporate level, I introduced and advised with the implementation of OKR, and I proposed and co-designed both productivity and acquisition initiatives.
            

    
    

    
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sum.cumo GmbH

Senior Web Developer and acting Technical Communications Lead

Meiert Web Development & Consulting

Founder

Sample responsibilities and accomplishments:

On the international Webmaster Team’s level I founded and managed the Webmaster Quality Assurance Team, I was the team liaison with Google Corporate Communications, Public Policy, as well as Legal, and I was a member of the Webmaster Team’s on-call and emergency response teams.

On a corporate level I was the creator and technical lead for Google’s Go and Maia HTML/CSS frameworks as well as the lead for the Google HTML/CSS coding guidelines (google.github.io/styleguide/htmlcssguide.html), both for which I headed respective teams and priorities.

Not counting smaller forms of recognition my overall contributions got awarded more than 30 times for impact or excellence.

- More details about the many aspects of my work at Google: <a href="http://meiert.com/en/blog/goodbye">meiert.com/en/blog/goodbye</a>.)
            

    
    

    
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Jens Meiert

Jens Meiert