About Me

I’m Den Odell and I’ve spent 25 years building web systems for companies whose users number in the hundreds of millions. I focus on the intersection of engineering and craft: software that performs well, works for everyone, and holds up at scale. I’ve written books on software development, led frontend architecture for brands like Nike and Volvo Cars, and most recently worked as a Staff Frontend Engineer at Canva.

Den Odell

Canva (2025 - 2026)

At Canva, I was a Staff Frontend Engineer in the Pro Design group, working on integrating tools for professional designers across 265 million monthly active users.

Volvo Cars (2016-2025)

I built the Car Configurator and later the Offer Selector web products from scratch as the sole engineer and owned them through launch across 70+ markets. The systems handled pricing, configuration, and purchase flows for millions of users in dozens of languages, all running on a microfrontend architecture I designed and maintained as the team grew around it. I also built some of the foundational shared components that became Volvo's design system. Along the way I ended up building backend-for-frontend APIs, PDF generation services, and caching layers, which gradually shifted how I think about the boundary between frontend and full stack.

AKQA (2002-2015)

Thirteen years, from developer to Global Head of Web Development. I led frontend engineering across studios working with Nike, Ferrari, and MINI, set hiring standards, and built a cross-office engineering culture. I founded TECH.insight, a worldwide public developer event series that brought in speakers from Google, Adobe, and BBC, and launched TECH.review, a digital publication on development and design.

Books

My first two books were published by Apress in 2009 and 2014 and have been cited in over 80 academic papers and adopted by universities internationally. My current book, Fast by Default: Practical Performance Engineering, is with Manning and draws on everything I learned optimizing production systems across my career. The book is based on my performance methodology, Fast by Default, which largely originated from my Volvo Cars work.

Writing

My essays on engineering, performance, and the craft of building software have reached over 125,000 readers, with work shared by Josh W. Comeau, Chris Coyier, Jeremy Keith, and Jeffrey Zeldman. My post on the HTML output tag reached #1 on Hacker News in October 2025 and led to changes in Joomla CMS. My post on frontend soak testing introduced a way to run these tests in compressed time, faking the clock and the network so hours of app usage take minutes, and led to playwright-soak-test, now used by open source maintainers to check their own libraries. My work has been featured in JavaScript Weekly, Frontend Focus, React Status, This Week in React, Web Weekly, TLDR, and Hackaday.

Featured On

In May 2026 I appeared on the Señors at Scale podcast discussing my book "Fast by Default," and my work at Canva. In August 2026 I joined Chris Chinchilla on the Tech Lounge podcast.

My book Pro JavaScript Development has been cited in peer-reviewed research at ACM venues, most recently by researchers at IIT Delhi and Northwestern in 2026, twelve years after publication.

I’m a participant in the W3C Real User Measurement Community Group. I also serve as a judge for the WMA WebAwards and for the Academy of Interactive & Visual Arts, where I review web entries for the w3 Awards and the Davey Awards. I was a technical reviewer for Fluent Web Development by Stefan Baumgartner (O'Reilly).

More from Den

Monthly notes on engineering, writing, and the craft of building software. No fluff.