Ken Blizzard-Caron

Software Engineer
Denver Metropolitan Area
ken@blizzardcaron.com | kenblizzardcaron.com

I’m a dedicated Colorado-based engineer. I have over 15 years of professional experience developing for the web, with a lean towards front end. I’m also a husband, father, hobby coffee roaster, vegan, and slow runner. Contently employed at Indeed.

Technical Skills

11ty, Accessibility, Agentic AI / Claude Code / Cursor / Copilot, Agile Methodologies, Angular, Apollo, CI/CD, CSS 3, Docker, Emotion, Express, Figma/Lunacy, Gatsby, Git, Gitlab CI, GraphQL, HTML 5, Internationalization, Jamstack, JavaScript, Jenkins, Jest, Jira, Kubernetes, LangChain, Laravel, Micro-frontends, Microservices, MongoDB, MySQL, Netlify, NodeJS, NumPy, PHP, Python, PyTorch, React Testing Library, React, RWD, Screen Readers, Security, SEO, Tailwind, TypeScript, User Experience, WCAG, Web Components, Web Performance, Webpack, WordPress

Work Experience

Staff Software Engineer - Indeed

2025 - Present
Engineering solutions for employers to discover and hire talent with emerging technology.

Senior UX Developer - Indeed

2022 - 2025
Mentored associate and mid-level engineers. Key engineer for launching Smart Sourcing, a new experience that matches job seekers with employers with AI technology. Currently working on high-profile company objectives within the Employer Journey organization for an exciting new experience. Leads a development team solving accessibility and UX remediation.

UX Developer - Indeed

2019 - 2022
The world’s most popular job site. Increased hire signals for employers that manage job listings. Led migration of making our enterprise web application follow RWD (Responsive Web Design) principles and be accessible for all. Led development of an Employer Reputation dashboard, empowering best practices and open communication between job seekers and employers.

Front End Engineer - PlumRiver LLC

2018 - 2019
Ecommerce B2B that acquired CenterStoneTechnologies in the athletic apparel industry with many high profile clients including Volcom, Puma, and Timberland. Successfully engineered merging of the CenterStone iVendix platform with the React-based Elastic Suite platform.

Web Development Engineer - CenterStone Technologies, Inc.

2014 - 2018
Successful Enterprise ecommerce B2B in the athletic apparel industry with many high profile clients including New Balance, Patagonia, and The North Face. Led full-stack migration of a legacy ColdFusion web application to a MEAN (Mongo/Express/Angular/Node) SPA (Single Page Application).

Available upon inquiry - Prior work

2009 - 2014
This experience represents the start of my career out of college. Begins with my experience at a small indie game company, to my pivot into web in the Boulder tech startup scene. Companies include a genealogy search engine: Mocavo, a non-profit charity platform: Giveo, and an advertising agency: rabble+rouser.

Education

• Bachelor’s Degree: Electronic Game & Interactive Development
  Champlain College (2005 - 2009)
  Burlington, VT

Certifications

• Nanodegree: Indeed AI Upskilling for Software Engineers
  Udacity (2025)
• Web Accessibility Specialist
  International Association of Accessibility Professionals (2023)
• Professional Certificate: C++
  Champlain College (2009)

↓ PDF resume  ·  ↓ Markdown resume

This post is a bit meta — I’m going to walk through how I built this site and the thinking behind it. The main thing I wanted to solve was keeping my web resume and a print-friendly PDF in sync without maintaining two separate versions of everything.

One source of truth

All my resume and site content lives in the _data directory. The main file is _data/author.json, where I keep my name, title, skills, work history, education, certifications, and so on. Both the site’s Nunjucks templates and the generated resume markdown pull from this data, so when I update something, I only have to do it in one place. No copy-pasting, no wondering which version is current.

Web and print from the same content

Here’s how the three outputs come together:

1. Website — The site is a WebTUI terminal interface built by 11ty. The Resume tab renders resume.md inline via a markdownFile filter in the main template — no traditional layouts or partials involved.

2. Markdown resume — I have a file called resume.txt.njk (with permalink: /resume.md) that uses the same author data to output a single markdown file at /resume.md. That’s what you see linked as “↓ Markdown resume” in the Resume tab.

3. PDF resume — After the site builds, a script called generate-pdf.js kicks in. It reads the built _site/resume.md, converts it to HTML with markdown-it, and then uses Puppeteer to print that HTML to a PDF (with some print-specific CSS for page breaks and layout). The end result is a PDF that’s always generated from the same markdown, which came from the same author.json. On Netlify, the build command handles all of this — Puppeteer/Headless Chrome runs as part of the deploy, so both the site and the PDF stay up to date automatically.

So the full flow looks like: author data → Nunjucks (site + resume.md) → markdown-it + Puppeteer → PDF. One source of truth, web and print always in sync.

Tech stack (brief overview)

Here’s a quick rundown of what I’m using:

• 11ty (Eleventy) — Static site generator. Takes Nunjucks templates, Markdown, and JSON data as input and outputs HTML (plus the markdown file used for the PDF).
• Nunjucks — Templating for all layouts and partials. Data from author.json flows through Nunjucks into every page.
• WebTUI — CSS framework that gives this interface its terminal aesthetic. Handles theming, components, and the dark colour scheme.
• Three.js + AsciiEffect — Powers the Cube World Demo. Three.js renders the 3D cube world; the AsciiEffect addon converts each frame into coloured ASCII characters for the terminal look.
• markdown-it — Used inside generate-pdf.js to convert the resume markdown into HTML before Puppeteer gets involved.
• Puppeteer — Headless Chrome that renders the HTML and generates the final PDF. Netlify installs Chrome at build time and runs the script as part of npm run build.
• Netlify — Hosting and CI. Every deploy runs the 11ty build followed by the PDF script, so everything stays current.

Scratch Pad

The Scratch pad is a catch-all for things that don’t belong on a resume. It’s where I put hobby projects, experiments, and personal logs — anything I want a persistent home for but that isn’t professional work. That includes things like interactive canvas demos, coffee roast logs from my Aillio Bullet, and whatever else I’m tinkering with at a given moment.

Work-in-progress experiments — unpolished, just for fun.

Boston 2126

Auto-playing isometric timelapse of Boston from 2026 to 2126 under climate change — 100 years in 60 seconds. Sea walls rise, neighborhoods flood, and the city rebuilds in the visual language of SimCity 2000. Built with Phaser 4.

Open Boston 2126 ↗

Cube World Demo

ASCII-rendered 3D cube where a character walks across all six faces. Movement wraps at every edge using BFS pathfinding for click-to-walk. Tile colors can be picked up and mixed.

Open Cube World Demo ↗

Storytime

Public domain stories read aloud in rapid serial visual presentation — one word at a time, rendered as ASCII art. Voice and display stay in sync via Web Speech API word events.

Open Storytime ↗

Roast Log

ASCII roast profile charts from an Aillio Bullet R2 session — temperature curves and rate-of-rise visualized with asciichart.

Open Roast Log ↗