Writing
Git for Humans
Author of Git for Humans, published by A Book Apart in 2016.
Senior / Staff Web Engineer • NYC/NJ
David Demaree
Front-end engineer and published technical author with 20 years shipping production web apps, sites, and design systems used by millions.
Deep in React, Next.js, WordPress, Astro, Sanity, handcrafted CSS, and Tailwind. I own delivery, review code, work directly with clients, and connect design intent to shippable product.
How I can help
Senior front-end execution with product judgment.
- Hands-on build Production UI, marketing sites, CMS-backed pages, design systems, performance work, and custom app surfaces from plan through launch.
- Architecture & delivery Component architecture, design tokens, accessibility, frontend data flows, code review, and the decisions that make a system easier to keep shipping.
- Client-facing product work I can sit with founders, executives, designers, and engineers, translating strategy into clear implementation steps without losing the craft.
Skills
Deep front-end practice, with enough backend and CMS range to ship the whole thing.
Frontend
- React
- Next.js
- Astro
- Svelte
- Web Components
- TypeScript
- Modern CSS
- Tailwind
CMS
- WordPress
- Sanity
- Contentful
- Custom backends
Backend/Data
- Node
- Ruby on Rails
- PHP
- Postgres
- MySQL
- MongoDB
- Elasticsearch
- Redis
Practice
- WCAG accessibility
- Core Web Vitals
- Component architecture
- Design tokens
- AI-assisted development
Experience
Recent client work and product-company scale.
-
Bits&Letters
Founder & Principal
- Built real-time data displays for Stripe's 2025 Black Friday campaign with SvelteKit, Sanity, and custom ETL.
- Built HIPAA-compliant data pipeline and data-lake architecture for a Series B health tech startup.
- Advised CopilotKit on its pivot to agentic AI, including developer docs and CoAgents SDK launch messaging.
- Delivered Everself's brand relaunch in 10 weeks, hitting launch-quarter Core Web Vitals and conversion targets.
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Webflow
Principal Product Manager, Designer Experience
- Shipped CSS variables and functions, adopted by 75% of users with published sites within the first month post-launch.
- Followed with shared component libraries and slots, with strong enterprise adoption.
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Stripe
Staff Product Manager, Design Systems
- Led the first public release of Sail, Stripe's React-based design system and UI toolkit for the Stripe Apps third-party SDK.
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Google
Product Manager, Material / Fonts
- Led the Material 3 rollout for Android 12 across 50-60 teams, including Gmail, Messages, Phone, and Calendar.
- Owned Google Fonts and Material Web Components, and shipped variable fonts and icon libraries on Google Fonts.
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Adobe
Staff Engineer / Principal PM, Typekit
- Principal technical owner of the Typekit web app and customer backend, growing from senior engineer to product lead.
- Built Creative Cloud identity, entitlement, and activation integrations while scaling web-font users from roughly 50K to 5M+.
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Gannett
Senior Engineer, Metromix
- Technical owner for a large internal Rails CMS, including Solr faceted search and ETL for wire content and local listings data.
Speaking
Product and web craft
Talks include Decoupled Days 2025, Web Directions Product 2019, Web Directions South 2013, and TYPO Berlin 2013.
Education
SAIC
School of the Art Institute of Chicago, BFA, 2004.
What folks say about working with me
David strikes that rare balance of design, creativity, and technical know-how, and made it easy for our team to move fast without sacrificing quality. He made the process of building and updating pages fun by creating templates and reusable components.
David's expertise straddles both deep technical concepts alongside a crisp view of customer needs. During his time at Webflow, he has led the launch of Variables - a launch that entailed - deep functionality, deep interoperability with our platform as well as external platforms, and the ability to scale over time.
David is a steady hand that launches features thoughtfully, with a solid bar for customer value, and can break down even the most complex of roadmaps into pieces that are easy for the team to deliver and rally behind.
David is one of those rare product leaders who truly bridges design, engineering, and storytelling.
He has a rigorous, systems-oriented mind that makes complex problems feel solvable. I suspect that his experience working at some of the best product companies has sharpened his ability to connect design and development decisions with the seemingly intangible and moving target of user delight. It's sort of magical working with him! Whether we were aligning on product strategy or refining granular details within a user experience, he consistently brought a mix of precision and empathy that raised the bar for everyone around him.
What I appreciate most about David is his commitment to the craft, great taste, and building things that both get the job done and push expectations about what great can look and feel like. He doesn't just ship features or websites; he builds systems that are elegant, maintainable, and deeply considered.
Get in touch
Need a senior front-end engineer who can own the work?
Send a note, or download the one-page PDF for the compact version.