Jared Krause

Work

TunnelBear Website
[tunnelbear.com]

I'm the tech lead for the web team at TunnelBear. Our suite of websites serve millions of users a month, so it’s important for them to be fast, lightweight, accessible and scalable. Through my time at TunnelBear I’ve spearheaded the adoption of JAM Stack and offloaded DNS and network complexity to Cloudflare’s edge. Our frontend websites are now efficiently distributed globally as tiny bundles of static code using a fully serverless architecture. Our deploys and testing are automated, so my team and I can focus all of our effort into coding new features instead of struggling with environments or deploys. I’m really proud of what I’ve built here, and I’ve learned a lot by testing the limits of JavaScript frameworks, edge workers, serverless architecture, automation, and testing.

TunnelBear Browser Extension
[Firefox, Chrome]

I'm the core developer for the TunnelBear browser client. It's a VPN that runs in Chrome, Firefox and Opera and serves hundreds of thousands of users globally. It's built with Vue.js, TypeScript and Webpack, with a focus on security, privacy and accessibility.

Open Source

Let It Snow ❄
[Firefox, Github]

This is a silly lightweight browser extension that adds a snow animation overlay to Firefox or Chrome. I was feeling particularly festive one evening and built it, and keep coming back to it to add features.

Sound Less Dumb
[soundlessdumb.com, Github]

This website was a joke that evolved into something cool. It's a little React project that transforms user inputs into funny and nonsensical sentences. Initially I used the Merriam-Webster API to translate inputs, but after tweeting about it I found the requests were surpassing their daily usage limits, so I used Python to generate chunked thesaurus files and lazy load them with Webpack. Even though this project is ridiculous, I learned a lot about how to efficiently serve data.

Slack Responder Bot
[Github]

This is a Slack App that asks users questions. It's a work in progress. It's going to be a bot that asks users about their day, because I think it might encourage people to think through some of the heaviness of the workday. It's built with Node.js, Webpack and TypeScript.

js-type-text
[npm, Github]

This is an npm package that generates a typing animation. I decided to turn the animated title of this website into an open sourced npm package so other people can use it. It's a tiny little JavaScript API that generates a typing animation through a callback function. It's a framework agnostic typing animation package built with vanilla JavaScript. Works with Vue.js, React, and everything else.

This website!
[Github]

I built and designed this website with Vue.js and Webpack because I feel like it's weird when web developers don't have... websites. It's hosted, served and continuously deployed as a static bundle through Netlify...It's scalable so if it ever gets popular, I'll be ready. The background animation something I whipped up with Three.js.