ZOUHIR CHAHOUD

Web Platform Engineer

Twitter: @_zouhir

GitHub: /zouhir

Email: zouhir@zouhir.org

Work Experience

Web Engineer / TPM

Microsoft, Redmond, WA - USA
May 2018 - Present

In the current role leading the incubation, development and standardization for new CSS and DOM APIs in Chromium web platform for Composition, Animations and Input.

As part of the role, collaborated and co-lead engineering teams in Microsoft Edge as well as deeply collaborated and co-engineered web apps innovations in Office Online, Bing and Windows.

Few examples of new APIs, tools and libraries: Dual-Screen devices CSS, script APIs, Emulator, Polyfills; spec-compliant ScrollTimeline polyfill; spec-compliant MediaRecorder API shim for EdgeHTML.

Represented Microsoft and drove APIs standardization in various W3C working groups such as CSSWG and Second-screen CG & WG.

What I'm most proud of:
  • Dual-Screen APIs: Created a new CSS media query and script API enabling developers to adjust to multiple display devices: foldables, dual-screen devices and enabling future, next-generation experiences [link].
  • VirtualKeyboard API: Co-authored the specification and co-lead the prototype development with Office Online (Word, Excel and PowerPoint), solving a long-time web developer frustrations with the soft-keyboards behavior [link].
  • Microsoft Edge Origin Trials: Lead the project development and managed an engineering team implementing the service, that was publicly announced at //build 2020 [link].

Senior Web Engineer

Qantas, Sydney - Australia
Oct. 2016 - Apr. 2018

Led the UI development for the majority of Qantas Frequent Flyers account pages, improving the web experience for our 11 million customers.

Proposed and prototyped the usage of Preact and demonstrated impressive results which led to choosing Preact to power major Qanats components.

Led the team who designed and built a medium scale, high traffic CMS based web application brought in-house from MasterCard, a global Qantas partner.

What I'm most proud of:
  • Conducted performance audits for Qantas' website.
  • Reduced JavaScript bundles size by up to 60% improving pages load time and performance especially for our mobile customers.
  • Various contributions to Preact OSS ecosystem including preact-habitat to simplify rendering Preact components in any CMS as well as enabling the preact-cli project to accept custom JavaScript language ES6-to-ES5 compiler settings.
  • Built multiple tools that improved the DX and boosted front-end teams productivity.
  • Created Qantas' first living Styleguide with Preact and React compatible components exports allowing all UI teams to utilize and contribute to a single Styleguide.

Software Engineer, JavaScript and UI

Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Sydney - Australia
Aug. 2015 - Oct. 2016

Played a key role in the development of responsive, printable and themable data visualization UI components for a reporting platform incorporating KPIs and other metrics relevant to banks on systems that cater to over 16,000 frontline staff.

Carried responsibility for performance tuning at numerous stages and was accountable for the transition from ES5 to ES6.

What I'm most proud of:
  • Saved the Analytics & Information (A&I) team months of work by providing reusable and themable D3.js & C3 data visualization widgets as node modules.

Consultant Software Engineer, Front End

Servian Pty Ltd, Sydney - Australia
June 2015 - Aug. 2015

Led the team in developing the Servian Intelligent Profiler.

Enforced superior development standards and used AngularJS / Javascript in the front-end of the product.

Collaborated extensively and contributed substantially to research projects and mathematical requirements.

What I'm most proud of:
  • First IBM Watson powered commercial product in Australia.
  • Intelligent Profiler was one of IBM's World of Watson winners.

Freelance Web Developer

Develoopers, Sydney - Australia
2013 - 2016

Developed and delivered tailor-made solutions covering web development and cloud services for industries like: real estate and car rental, online magazines, and others.

What I'm most proud of:
  • Created the Develoopers brand and company, registered in Australia since January-2014 under the name 'Develoopers', ABN `60 479 819 163`.

Software Engineer, Front End

Yatango Inc, Sydney - Australia
2014 - 2015

Worked with the front-end team and utilized AngularJS in creating the Yatango Mobile website.

Co-developed the Yatango e-commerce platform User Interface.

Collaborated closely with the Marketing and Design teams in adding new features to the startup's web applications and websites in both Mobile and Shopping verticals.

Web Application Developer

Stirring Interactive, Dubai - UAE
2011 - 2012

Utilized standard-compliant HTML, CSS and JavaScript in building high-profile websites and web applications viewed by millions each day for well-known creative agencies including Leo Burnett Dubai and YnR Jordan and brands such as Cadillac MENA, McDonald's Arabia, Dubai International Film Festival and Mr Chips Tortilla.

Carried responsibility for implementing cross-browser LTR, RTL and responsive layouts supporting English and Arabic languages as well as phones, tablets and PCs.

What I'm most proud of:
  • Built McDonald's Arabia official website's homepage.
  • Co-developed 2 Social media based competitions microsites that got thousands of participants and millions of views in Middle East and North Africa.

Open Source

Jarvis A very intelligent browser based Webpack dashboard capable of showing you treeshakable vs non-treeshakable JavaScript dependencies as well as your estimated assets load times on different connections (+5,000 stars)
Maaatch An offline ready memory match game with less than 20KB of JavaScript.
digital-rain-hn HackerNews client with animated canvas in the background rendered fully in a web-worker and maintains 60fps.
lqip, lqip-loader Low Quality Image Placeholders (LQIP) for Webpack & Node.js. (+1,000 stars)
preact-habitat Zero configuration Preact widgets renderer in any host DOM. (+300 stars)

Publications

Technical reviewer for multiple Chromium Dev Channel case studies such as A Pinterest Progressive Web App Performance Case Study and A React And Preact Progressive Web App Performance Case Study: Treebo.

Swipe Views with CSS Snap Points: Building a More Efficient Mobile Web Navigation (40k views)

Preact meets CMS: Building Lightweight Portable Widget Components (4.1k views)

Education

BSc. Information Technology, Major: Enterprise Systems Development

University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) - 2017

Achieved High Distinction for my final project work on Bilateral Multi-Perspective Matching for Natural Language Sentences in NLP.

BS. Information Technology

University of Kalamoon - 2011

Awards

Al Bassel 11 Programming Competition

Syrian National Award - 2007

Physics Pioneer

Syrian National Award - 1999 & 2000

Technologies

Web and App Development

JavaScript, Go, Python, React, NodeJS, Webpack, REST, CSS3, PHP, C, C#, Bash.

Cloud & Database Development

Azure, AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Docker, Linux, PL/Sql, PostgreSQL, MySQL.

Visual Design

Figma, Adobe Photoshop, Sketch.

References

My contact information and references to managers and senior coworkers are available upon request. Please contact me on zouhir@zouhir.org