Nice to meet you! I'm Tylus Dawkins.
Experienced Full-Stack Engineer with expertise in Web or API Development, Cloud Solutions, testing, and integration, honed through roles at Liberty Mutual, General Assembly and Doka. I am skilled in every step of the software development lifecycle. I empower teams and mentor others. I am passionate about delivering high-impact software solutions that drive business value through innovation and collaboration.
🌱 I was born and raised in Las Vegas, NV
⚡ Most recently, I was a Full time Software Engineer for Liberty Mutual where I worked on their IVR Chatbots, as well as their firewall applications. I have also been working on contract roles, as well as teaching part time!
💁: Before becoming a Software Engineer I worked in the insurance space working in contact centers, I spent time as an agent, a mentor/Nesting coach, and a Trainer/Learning Specialist.
Team Oriented: It is my goal to make sure that all of my associates have the tools and support to thrive in their jobs.
Collaboration: I believe all of our best work is done in conjunction with others
Transparency: It is impossible to work with others if you're not open and honest.
Integrity: Results are driven by well intenioned actions
I have proven expertise with several technologies, with Liberty Mutual I created chatbots with Node using JavaScript/Typscript, AWS Lex and Lambdas, I also created firewall container application with Python/Django, MySQL, and AWS. With Doka I worked with Angular creating a shipment/freight tracking application. With General Assembly I taught others how to work with React, JS, HTML, CSS, Python, Django, Mongdo and Postrgres. I worked with hundreds of students, and helped with thousands of projects.
This is a short collection of a few of the things I have worked on. Most of my best work has been done professionally on proprietary software I cannot share here, but here are a few of the things I have worked on in-between.
This is probably my most interesting project to talk about as it is truly the most learning I have done in the fewest days. I worked on this as part of a 4-day group hackathon for our onboarding with Liberty Mutual, there were a total of 4 of us, two on the frontend, and two on the backend, I worked on the frontend. This was my first time working with charts, I decided to learn Charts.JS while the others worked on either mocking data, setting up Models, Views, and controllers, or figuring out how to style the app. I had to stretch my knowledge of React, this is where I learned exactly why understanding that setState runs async, that it uses reference equation, and how to use helper functions within the frame of state manipulation was so important. One of the more fun challenges I had with this project was the loss of the backend, I could not possibly run the backend code for a public deployment, as the dependancies were in a library specific to LM's ecosystem, so I had to write a utility to come up with hundreds of randomized contacts so I could deploy this as a portfolio piece. If I were to re-write it now, I wouldn't change much honestly, the code needs cleaning, it's hard to read, and some functions could be condensed or combined, but I'm pretty proud of the work for only having had little less than 4 days to write it.
https://tylus-dawkins-ist.netlify.app
This was a take home project for a job I was interviewing for. I was asked to make a basic calendar appliction where I could accurately change months, months started on the right days, months had the correct amount of days, days before the current day of the month were grayed out and unselectable, that the current day would be highlighted, and that a future day could be selected. Ultimately I chose to copy the UI they provided as a mockup as I thought that being able to precisely replicate a design showed more skill than putting my own spin into the design. I found the logic to be rather simple, as an optional feature they asked that I had some unit tests to go with the application, at the time, I hadn't written unit tests for React, so I decided to go all of the way in and get 100% testing coverage, and decided to test my own edge cases that I could see being an issue.
https://tylus-dawkins-ist.netlify.app
I built this as an idea I had for a little known game called "Dungeons and Dragons". It is built using React See I am a big fan of DnD, however there is one big barrier to playing it, getting a table of people together. So I wanted to think of a system that could allow for a DnD like experience that one could play on their own, and thus I took inspiration from roguelike games, as they are typically highly re-playable as most of them feature randomized combat abilities. Background aside, this project has been an excellent experience in terms of both logic/scripting and UI/UX. It forced me to outgrow some old habits and learn some new skills, such as not making enough components for re-use, implementing callbacks, using local storage. I have complex logic for deciding what spells and abilities the player gets, state management for resources that include messages when certain actions are not possible, etc. In terms of UI/UX, it offers a mixture of rich colors, high contrast, and a parchment/scroll aesthetic. There's consistency in the styling and a sense of belonging in the elements.
https://5e-rogue-like.netlify.app
This is a project that I have been building as part of a family project, it is currently on hold, and thus development has stopped on it, it's certainly not my best or prettiest work but it still details an interesting part of my journey. Originally I built this out in plain ol' React, since first starting development it became abundantly clear that React on its own was not well suited for this sort of project, with plans for hundreds of images to be rendered at a time, as well as the expanding tech debt that is development in base react, I felt that using a SSR framework was a must and that it would make the development experience much better if I could write API routes within the same project. Thus I converted all of my react Syntax to Next syntax and learned how to develop in Next. Like I mentioned earlier, it's not super pretty, it's also not incredibly technical, but I learned how to incorporate express functionalities into Next components. Now, it is worth mentioning that this is a full-stack app with an admin dashboard in the background, I have implemented full-crud into this.
