Prashant Sharma

I currently work as a Senior Front End lead with ShoreTel, Bangalore, India, a company working in the UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service) domain. I have been a front end developer for close to a decade now.

At my day job, I'm currently building a UCaaS client (think of it as something that offers Skype + Slack + other telephony related features) using CanJS (now DoneJS) and NW.js. Since I wanted to learn more about the underlying framework, I asked the DoneJS team if I could contribute to the framework in any way. They gave me an opportunity to join DoneJS as a core member. This is the only open source project (also my first) that I contribute to. More details here:

https://donejs.com/About.html#section=__PrashantSharma

Let me talk a bit about my background. I started my career in 2003 as a Java server-side programmer. I absolutely loved it since the Java ecosystem was so vast (it still is) and I had ample opportunities to learn. Fast forward 3 years, I got to work on a tool called Google Web Toolkit (GWT). While working with GWT, I realized web development was much more than creating HTML forms. While I did like Java, compiling/building a large code base and then getting to see the result of your efforts was a time consuming process. With HTML and JavaScript, I could make changes in my code, refresh my browser and see the changes immediately. I liked the instant gratification web development offered.

I later got a chance to work with other web frameworks as well: Backbone.js, AngularJS 1.x, jQuery, Bootstrap. As I delved deeper into JavaScript, I came to appreciate the power of functional programming. Fast forward to today, I see so many exciting things happening in the Web community. ES6 is out and ES7 is in the works. I sometimes think it's only now that we've started giving Web the respect it deserves. There are many exciting things that lie ahead. Many exciting things to learn, explore and create.

I'd like to learn from all the great people who are working towards making the Web better, identify what I'm uniquely good at and contribute something back to the community.

I have the following specific goals for 2017:

1 - Speak at a local front end conference

2 - Speak at an international front end conference

3 - Be consistent with my open source contributions. Make at least 2 contributions per month

4 - Identify a challenging area and work towards becoming an authority in that area