My name is Kurt Petrek, I am a software engineer focusing on frontend development with over five years of professional experience. Currently I work at UiPath where I lead the frontend team on Automation Hub. I believe web applications should be performant, visually appealing, secure, responsive and accessible. The open nature of the web attracted me to teach myself programing while the challenge of problem solving and the joy of seeing my creations used by thousands of users drives me to continue to learn more.
I graduated from the University of Cincinnati in 2010 with a bachelors degree in Electronic Media. My coursework during college focused on graphic design, audio and video production as well as web development, business and history. After graduation I moved to Brooklyn, New York where I worked out of Continental Recording Studio and for various live sound companies before becoming interested in web development. Having taken some courses on web development in college I had a foundation to build on and found I could learn a lot more for free on the web and gain valuable problem solving and research abilities along the way.
In 2015 I started a position as a technology instructor at the New York Public Library where I taught free coding classes in Midtown Manhattan for their Project Code and Kids Coding Hour classes. In 2017 I took a position through City University of New York at LaGuardia Community College teaching HTML, CSS, JavaScript and Git in a four week crash course to prepare students for various coding bootcamps. In 2018 I started a job as a React Developer at App Partner, an app development agency, where I worked on various web applications and content management systems. In 2019 UiPath acquired App Partner where I started as a Software Engineer I and have since been promoted up twice to Senior Software Engineer.
Over the years I have worked on various personal and professional projects. Here are a few of my favorite personal projects. Most of these I created several years ago when I was teaching myself to code or teaching but I am still proud of many of them.
This is an idea I came up with to animate a comic strip using React, SVG and CSS animations.
Type Fall is a typing game I created in React when I was a teacher to try to help my students improve their typing abilities.
I have always had a passion for music. This is one of my first programming projects where I created a musical keyboard using jQuery.
This is a more recent musical project where I used Illustrator to create a SVG guitar pick and then animate it with CSS and make it interactive with JavaScript
This is an interactive audio mixer I programmed and composed the loops for.
This is a CSS illustration I made in celebration of Earth Day.
This is my most popular pen with over 25,000 views that showcases a variety of hamburger menu animations
This was a fun experiment I did in animating a jpg and showing an old student how to create a Simon says game
Ghosteroni is a CSS animation I created around halloween in 2018
Animating React logos using React and CSS
CSS illustration and animation paying tribute to being raised in the midwest