Hi👋, I'm Johann Schuster

I’m a Web developer from Los Angeles, CA.

I have a keen interest in building JavaScript-based frontend technologies for all kinds of devices. I have mostly been working on Video Streaming software for the last six years. Currently, I am a lead engineer (P4) at Disney Streaming, on the applied R&D team building next-gen ad experiences.

I transitioned to engineering from a background in music performance as a classical bassist and punk/metal guitarist and vocalist. Outside of work, I love the outdoors and am a humble surfer when I’m not hanging out with my amazing wife and daughter.

If any of these things strike a chord with you say hi or let’s connect!

Experience

Disney Streaming

2020 - present

I joined the Disney+ web team as a senior engineer slightly more than a year after Disney+ was launched. Some contributions I made included building out the age verification system used in South Korea, facilitated backward incompatible API migrations, and produced new releases and production deployments. Tech used included React, NodeJS and GraphQL.

The next team I joined (Content Discovery) built the Disney Streaming Design System. It was a fun project that included building a standalone multi-variant NPM package currently still in use. In addition to building the tool, we scoured every nook and cranny of the Disney+ codebase integrating the design system, one CSS class at a time. Tech used here was primarily SASS and NodeJS.

More recently I’ve been fortunate enough to work on and lead greenfield projects covering a variety of codebases and platforms, including mobile and TV devices. Projects that I hope I can share with the world soon.

Motortrend (Discovery Communications)

2018 - 2020

I joined Motortrend right after Discovery acquired the business in 2018. I was the 4th hire on the Connected Devices team and represented JavaScript platforms. During my time at Motortrend, I had the privilege of working on Discovery’s custom TV framework that powered all their browser-based TVs, STBs, and gaming consoles. I built the Motortrend On Demand streaming app using this framework for Xbox, Android TV, FireTV, Comcast STBs, and Samsung. I also maintained a high traffic multi-variant React Native app called Buyer's Guide and Automobile.

During this time I also supported Discovery brands like the Eurosport Player, Food Network Kitchen and worked on the Discovery+ AdTech SDK (living room devices) during its development as a maintainer/ contributor of the core framework.

HOTB Software

2017 - 2018

HOTB Software is a software and investment firm that helps get startups off the ground. I was hired as a React Native developer and built a cross-platform iOS/Android app called FlipTix, a platform that "flips" time left on live event tickets. I architected and built the mobile app, and handled the app store submissions and internal enterprise distributions.

Topflight Apps

Early 2017

Topflight Apps was my first coding gig. I worked mostly on Wordpress sites, extending themes, improving UI or fixing bugs. I also migrated a MySQL database which scared me to death at the time.

Till this day I am grateful to Joe Tuan for this opportunity, he took the risk and hired a self-taught dev and it changed the course of my life significantly.

Development

I enjoy building for the frontend. I love learning about consumer devices and the hardware that powers them. Building for such a variety of devices has ultimately made me a better developer. If you’ve built for Samsung 2016 TVs, I’m sure you would agree 😉.

I use React for building UIs when not building for TV. I am familiar with it and its inner workings. I have tried building a renderer for it in Rust, using Netflix’s React Gibbon (C++ with a JS view layer architecture) as inspiration, but Rust’s memory safeness made it very difficult. For better or worse, I have learned a lot from React and it has influenced my frontend work more than any other codebase. I’ve been playing around with Svelte’s Repl though, and am intrigued to learn more.

There was a time where I was excited about building the entire stack from the ground up, but these days services like Vercel and Netlify make it too easy to build, deploy and manage something quick (for personal projects of course). I’ve used NextJS extensively both at Disney and in my side projects. I built ask-carl.com using NextJS deployed to Vercel, and my current project bugchain.io is built with RedwoodJS and deployed to Vercel as well. I have built my own self-hosted infrastructure and deployment/data pipelines too, mostly on AWS. Redwood is an opinionated framework built on React, Node, GraphQL, and Prisma and has quite literally reduced my coding time by half (a single command builds the REST endpoints, forms, and GraphQL queries for a given database model).

I am a big fan of functional programming. I am by no means a master, but I apply concepts like composition, piping, and point-free in my work whenever possible. JavaScript’s feature of creating closures lends itself beautifully to the FP paradigm. I also like RxJS (and reactive programming in general), it is one of the best libraries I’ve used and extremely useful for event-driven (like video players) programs.

Tooling-wise, I’ve been using Rollup for standalone NPM libraries and packages, and Vite (love it!) for applications and sites, but I’ve used Webpack more in production (Webpack + Yarn Workspaces = awesome DX).

Contact

If you’re looking for a solid frontend staff level engineer for your team or a technical co-founder to build an impressive MVP I’d love to connect. You can email me at jschuster.dev@gmail.com