Who am I

Vanessa Otto

Senior Frontend Developer, Public Speaker, Engineering Manager
Munich, Germany

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Web Development

I build websites in terms of the look and feel and how users will interact with them across all common browsers and devices. I love to code, no matter if the project is organized in a big monolith or in tiny micro-frontends.

IxD

Interaction Design

Frameworks are there for organizing our minds, not our code. My focus is on both the developer & designer experience (DX) and the user experience (UX) to create the best user interfaces (UI) possible.

Primary Tools

HTML
CSS
Tailwind CSS
JavaScript
TypeScript
Vue.js
Pinia
Histoire
Vite
Vitest
Jest

Secondary Tools

Netlify
Vercel
Cypress
AXE
Pug
Mustache
Handlebars
SASS
DaisyUI
BEM
Bulma
Sapper.js
Playwright
Svelte.js
Nuxt.js
Vuex
web components
Storybook
Webpack
RollUp

about me

Vanessa is a Senior Frontend Developer on the Design Systems Team at GitLab, where she focuses on building and maintaining the foundational elements of GitLab's design system. Previously, she was the Head of Frontend at Zavvy.io, which was acquired by Deel in 2024. She holds an M.Sc in Media Informatics with a focus on Human-Computer Interaction and co-hosts two popular podcasts, Working Draft and expect(Exception). Vanessa is an experienced public speaker and workshop facilitator, sharing her expertise and passion for technology with diverse audiences. She has contributed to multiple conferences, serving on program committees for notable events like JS Kongress and moderating VueJS Germany.

Feel free to send me a message on Mastodon, LinkedIn or email.

The code of this web page is written in Svelte and is available on GitHub:

Open GitHub Repository

This web site does not load a single tracking library. You can click on the link, I will never know 🙂