Bilal Çınarlı

Bilal Çınarlı

Engineering Manager / Frontend Architect

What I'm Doing?

I'm a big enthusiast of building maintainable and scalable frontends. To achieve this goal, I analyse the problems, observe the business changes, partner with product owners to define technology roadmaps and look for opportunities.

I deal with architectural decisions and PoCs. I work to enable engineers to perform without blockers. Also, to improve developer experience, I deal with developer tooling, analyse the pain points and work to improve the local development environment, developer happiness and productivity.

I help to grow my team both in technical and in their soft skills. I regularly mentor junior engineers and coach senior / staff engineers. In addition to this, I hired engineers, built high-performing teams, and managed team harmony and growth throughout my career

To deliver the goals better, depending on the needs and requirements, I built web frameworks, created design systems, designed frontend architectures, taught modern web development and gave workshops.

I volunteer at Women in Tech and Women Developer Academy and mentor junior or new grad candidates to give back to the community. Also, I'm a Google Developer Expert in Web Technologies. With that, I speak at online or onsite conferences and join podcasts to share my knowledge and experience both in technical and managerial/career aspects.

How I'm Doing?

I read a lot to keep my skills up to date. I love to learn new things and experiment with new approaches. I believe in fail fast, fail beautiful, tweak and restart approach.

I provide guided flexibility and a safe environment to the teams I manage. I listen to the engineers and what they are keen on building. Then, I encourage them to create initiatives towards those and fine-tune them to overlap with company OKRsand targets.

Even though I have vast expertise in frontend development and developer tooling, I have a good understanding and hands-on experience in backend, cloud, DevOps and databases.

Those skills help me to understand the end-to-end flow and navigate through unknowns. That helped me find opportunities to improve application performance, developer experience and business. For example, while working at adidas in 2021, I contributed an 80 million Euro uplift in online sales by seeing an opportunity to improve page speed after analysing the user/visit analytics data and browser statistics.

Since 2001, I have used different stacks in the frontend, from Prototype to MooTools to jQuery, Backbone to Angular and React, and TypeScript and Node. For styling, I used different approaches like utilities to BEM and OOCSS, pure CSS to preprocessors like Less and Sass, PostCSS, CSS-in-JS, and CSS Modules. On the tooling side, from ready-made tools to Browserify, Grunt and Gulp to Webpack and then esbuild, Vite. Not to mention testing with Mocha, Chai, Istanbul, Jest, and libraries like Enzyme, Testing Library and linting the code with jshint, eslint, stylelint, prettier... However, I do not have a strong preference for the tools. Whatever works best for the team is more important.

What I Did?

I've coded top class websites and intranet applications. Worked in more than 400 projects, spoke at more than 20 conferences across Europe. Here are some selection of those;

I created a simple rendering engine for this page, it is about 100 lines of code and helps me to create components, update DOM and write HTML inside JavaScript.

With my team, I designed the frontend architecture in adidas. An approach called "micro-applications" to unblock teams and allowing them to deploy independently under same domain along with an accompanied meta framework to improve developer experience and application's overall performance.

I was lucky to explain the Micro Application approach in different conferences. You can check the slides from WeAreDevelopers conference from 2022 and International JS Conference from 2021.

  1. Micro Applications @WeAreDevelopers Presentation cover for the talk called, Micro Applications; Independently together; Better Developer experience and app performance
  2. Micro Applications @International JS Conference Presentation cover for the talk called, Micro Applications: Device&Conquer

With my team, in Turkcell, I created a design system library called UXRocket and Sass/CSS tooling for it called Caffeine and Melange and a templating library called Breve. Turkcell still uses this design system and tooling around it in it's CRM application that serves more than 40 million customer.

During my agency years, I created a PHP/MySQL-based Content Management System that supports templating, taxonomy, and extensions. Also, we built an e-mail marketing software for customers to send newsletters.