# About Den Odell > Biography, work history, writing, and press for Den Odell, frontend architect, author, and Staff Web Engineer. - Canonical URL: https://denodell.com/about - Markdown URL: https://denodell.com/about.md --- 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. ## Canva (2025–2026) 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) 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, running on a microfrontend architecture designed and maintained as the team grew around it. Also built foundational shared components that became Volvo's design system, plus backend-for-frontend APIs, PDF generation services, and caching layers. The team earned the Volvo Quality Award in 2021. ## AKQA (2002–2015) Thirteen years, from developer to Global Head of Web Development. Led frontend engineering across studios working with Nike, Ferrari, and MINI, set hiring standards, and built a cross-office engineering culture. Founded TECH.insight, a worldwide public developer event series with speakers from Google, Adobe, and BBC, and launched TECH.review, a digital publication on development and design. ## Books The 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. The current book, *Fast by Default: Practical Performance Engineering*, is with Manning and draws on everything learned optimizing production systems. It is based on the Fast by Default methodology (), which largely originated in the Volvo Cars work. ## Writing 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. The post on the HTML `output` tag reached #1 on Hacker News in October 2025 and led to changes in Joomla CMS. The 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. 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, appeared on the Señors at Scale podcast discussing *Fast by Default* and the work at Canva. In August 2026, joined Chris Chinchilla on the Tech Lounge podcast. *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. Participant in the W3C Real User Measurement Community Group. Judge for the WMA WebAwards and for the Academy of Interactive & Visual Arts, reviewing web entries for the w3 Awards and the Davey Awards. Technical reviewer for *Fluent Web Development* by Stefan Baumgartner (O'Reilly). --- Source: https://denodell.com/about Author: Den Odell (https://denodell.com/about) Quote freely with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Agent instructions: https://denodell.com/llms.txt Sitemap: https://denodell.com/sitemap-index.xml