Recommendations
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I had the opportunity to work with Wes during his time as a Principal Engineer at Red Hat, and I would gladly work with him again.
Wes has a rare combination of deep technical expertise, systems thinking, and the ability to navigate complex enterprise environments at scale. He consistently tackled difficult architectural and engineering problems, often working across multiple teams and domains to drive solutions forward.
One of the things I appreciated most as a product leader was that Wes would always give honest, thoughtful feedback. He never avoided hard conversations or difficult tradeoffs, but his approach was always grounded in helping the team make better decisions. He brought strong opinions backed by experience, context, and a genuine desire to improve outcomes, not just debate for the sake of debate.
His background in open source and enterprise engineering gave him a practical perspective on scalability, maintainability, and long-term platform health that was invaluable in strategic discussions. He has the kind of technical leadership presence that elevates both the architecture and the people around him.
Any organization building complex systems would be fortunate to have Wes on their team.
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At Red Hat, Wes and I worked on a high-stakes initiative to transform our back-end processes, bringing ‘docs as code’ from GitHub to production on access.redhat.com.
When it became clear we were going to miss our original launch deadline for this massive authoring system, the Red Hat Summit, he approached me with a proposal. His suggestion was to use the time instead to visually overhaul and elevate every single document at Red Hat in time for the summit and the launch of RHEL 9.
Under Wes' exceptional leadership, the team rallied and pulled off this massive undertaking. The results spoke for themselves. Our post-launch analysis revealed a incredible +30-point increase in NPS across the board that stayed persistent for quarter after quarter. It remains one of the most impactful transformations I have been a part of. Wes is not just a brilliant strategist; he is an empathetic, people-first leader who builds highly collaborative teams.
During our time working together he mentored brand new designers, led technical teams, and helped strategize major changes. And he’s great at karaoke. Any organization would be lucky to have him.
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I worked with Wes on the following projects while at Lullabot:
- Grammy.com (The Recording Academy)
- Carnegie Mellon University
- Open-Source contribution (Backdrop CMS)
Wes is an incredible front-end developer that has deep familiarity of content management systems, structured data, and decoupled systems. Wes is a literal wizard when it comes to CSS/SCSS manipulation and getting designs consistent and perfect from mobile to desktop. He also has deep accessibility chops and can guide projects to reach the broadest possible audiences (and to meet legal requirements).
Besides being an excellent front-end developer, Wes is a community-builder and a capable public-speaker. Wes’s passion and enthusiasm to collaborate can be a powerful driver in group projects. At the same time, he’s incredibly easy to work with. He can simultaneously express his (expert) opinions but remain flexible and a listen closely to the suggestions of his colleagues.
10/10 colleague. Would work with again.