Hello, my name is Deric Mendez

I enjoy planning and building user experiences for web applications of all kinds with collaborative project teams. Below, you can get a glimpse of my career and skillsets since 2000.

I Love family, cooking and disc golf.
2025

Crema

Saught out Crema because I loved their values around building good products for users and customers. This included working collaboratively in an agile environment allowing all roles to contribute

Spent half my tenure here helping start-ups build out their product ideas and the other half helping enterprise organizations build out their internal tools.

Currently I consult with our clients to build the best version of their product as possible working with their teams and bringing in specialized help as needed while using collaboration and research tools and lean methodologies.

  • SvelteKit

    Nov 2024
    A client needed help improving their UI and happened to use SveltKit which showcased a great way to use a framework to help build frontend applications with SSR capabilities, stores, routing and reactive updates.

  • D3

    Jan 2019
    D3 with React is a great way to componentize visualizations using composable JSX components without D3's DOM utilities, leveraging and focusing on the core dataviz functions.

  • Typescript

    Jan 2019
    Introduced to TS through a React/Redux project. Definitely a humbling experience adding type assurance to an existing Javascript codebase, but the pay-off was worth it!

  • React

    Jan 2018
    Entroduced to React through co-workers research and willingness to experiement with it's universal capabilities across web and native platforms. Since then, have latched onto React due to it's community support and accessible learning curve.

  • Angular

    Jan 2017
    Prior to adopting React, Angular was our primary tool to build out single page apps leveraging their unique templating system (at the time).

  • Wordpress

    Jan 2016
    Majority of clients' products needed support for marketing/CMS which I was able to take on building out custom themes and plugins.
2014

DEG

My first job dedicated to building content sites with CSS/HTML within a custom .NET framework.

DEG eventually started working with clients to help build projects in Wordpress, Magento and Sitecore/Sharepoint environments which expoded me to several other languages such as PHP/.NET/Node.

  • jQuery

    Aug 2010
    Used jQuery and wrote custom plugins to help build out splash page and content page interactions.

  • CSS

    Aug 2008
    Spent a lot of time working with stylesheets and systemizing CSS on content sites with tools like SASS/LESS and applying through semantic HTML using atomic design principals.

  • Macromedia Flash

    Aug 2008
    JavaScript interactions were not as accessible as they are today, so setting up Flash components to add location map interactions and game-like interfaces were imperative to add unique interactions on client projects.

  • .NET

    Aug 2008
    About 70% of projects with DEG were .NET related. I was hired initially to build out UI's for all of our custom .NET projects.
2008

MultiService

Perfect entry level job where I got to help maintain the companies website but had the opportunity to work on internal projects, tools and e-commerce stories.

Turned out this was the perfect incubator to kick-off a ton of exploration and experience with a lot of new tools and technology at the time. Even got to spend some time maintaining server racks for online games. 😅

  • Perl

    Jan 2006
    Spent time learning how to interface with MySQL and building out a custom CMS. Also worked with Interchange ecommerce platform to help build out an electronics and stereo equipment store.

  • JavaScript

    Jan 2005
    I avoided JavasScript for a long time, but became inevitable the demand for interactions so started to embrace this tool more along with cross-browser frustrations.

  • MySQL

    Jan 2005
    Learned advanced indexing and querying capabilities to get related products on ecommerece stores.

  • Macromedia Flash

    Jan 2004
    Built out animated banners and theme'd games to use for website promotions

  • CSS

    Jan 2004
    I loved CSS Zen Garden at the time, so anything I could control with stylesheets while maintaining DOM integrity, was my obsession.
2004

Virtumundo

My first full time job outside of school! Got hired on as a web designer where I got to spend some time engaging with Photoshop more. Eventually got my hands on some flash experience with marketing banners and forms.

  • CSS

    Jan 2002
    Start using CSS to decorate landing pages and TreeLoot website.

  • HTML

    Jan 2002
    Not only used HTML for general content updates, but started to learn to use HTML for building targeted advertising emails.

  • Macromedia Flash

    Jan 2002
    Continued with animation and tweens then learned to apply ActionScripting to automate animations and add in logic for more interactive banners and games
2002

KCKCC Internship

Landed an internship that started part time through the school year then full time during summers.

Majority of my time was fixing bugs, updating content and the occational creative freedom to add new pages and banners.

  • Perl

    Jun 2001
    Learned to work with Perl for content updates and form submissions

  • HTML

    Jan 2001
    Learned to write semantic HTML in order to provide school's pages with searchable content.

  • CSS

    Jan 2001
    Start learning CSS in school work and applying minor css styling to school content pages

  • Macromedia Flash

    Jan 2001
    Used flash to build out animations and tweens for custom website ad banners

  • Photoshop

    Jan 2001
    Built out ad banners for school site and produced page mockups for particular departments
2001