Engineering + Empathy
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.
25Years building for the web
265MMonthly active users at Canva
70+Markets for Volvo’s Car Configurator
125k+Readers of my essays
80+Academic citations
3Books
2025–26
At Canva, I was a founding member of the Pro Design group, building tools for professional designers across 265 million monthly active users. The group launched publicly as Canva ProSuite in September 2026, and I worked on bringing Cavalry animations into Canva, one of the headline launch features. Before that, on the Data Viz team, I rebuilt the chart data table as a fully accessible ARIA grid with virtualization, so it now handles files 50 times larger than before.
2016–25
I built the Car Configurator and later the Offer Selector from scratch as the sole engineer. The Configurator went live across 70+ markets. During Covid, I built the Offer Selector in about two months, and it became the only way to buy a Volvo in the UK, online and across around 90 dealerships. It went on to reach about a dozen markets, and online conversion in those markets rose more than 10% year on year. I grew the team around it from one engineer to six, and I was on call for the system Volvo’s online sales ran through.
The Offer Selector ran on a microfrontend architecture I designed, and I split it into shared cart, price, and finance summary components that the checkout and configurator teams, and Volvo’s customer emails, went on to use. The Car Price component I designed is still live in around 25 markets. I was also one of about ten technical leads in Volvo’s architecture group, deciding on shared components and how applications fit together for around 200 engineers, and I led the upgrade to WCAG 2.2. 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.
2002–15
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.
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. US Mobile’s Senior Director of Frontend Engineering used the framework to audit their app and cut a 2MB+ JavaScript bundle by more than half.
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 run on a schedule by nuqs (around 5 million weekly downloads) and other 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.
I’m an invited speaker at P99 CONF 2026 (speaking on 21 October), which had around 30,000 registrants.
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, and in September 2026 I talked with Christopher Bailey on the Real Python 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).
The newsletter
Monthly notes on engineering, writing, and the craft of building software. No fluff.