I'm Jordan — a full-stack developer and designer based in Paris. I've spent 5 years building products that feel as good as they perform. I believe the best interfaces are the ones you don't notice.
Paris, FR · --:-- local
· Available
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Jordan Smith · Paris
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My story
I started building things at 16 — a terrible Flash game that nobody played. That failure taught me more than any course I've taken since.
Studied CS at Paris Cité University, graduated top of my class, immediately ignored everything they taught me about software architecture and shipped a startup instead.
Spent 3 years at Notion and Stripe, working on interfaces used by tens of millions of people. Learned that constraints make you creative, not cautious.
Now I take on select freelance projects and build open-source tools that scratch my own itches. If a problem is interesting enough, I'll figure out how to solve it.
Led the redesign of Stripe's checkout flow, used by 180M users across 42 countries. Reduced drop-off by 89% through 140+ user interviews and 6 months of iteration. Managed 2 junior engineers, mentored 4 interns.
ReactTypeScriptNode.jsA/B testingFigma
2020 — 2022
Notion
Frontend Engineer · San Francisco (remote)
Built collaborative editor components shipped to 20M users. Authored the design system token library adopted by 3 product teams. Performance optimization reduced TTI by 40% on editor load.
ReactLiveblocksCSS-in-JSYjs
2019
Deezer
Frontend Intern · Paris
Rebuilt the artist profile page serving 6M daily visitors. First time writing code that real people actually used. Changed everything.
Vue.jsSCSSREST API
2016 — 2020
Paris Cité University
BSc Computer Science · Graduated 1st class
Algorithms, systems, distributed computing. Thesis on real-time collaborative conflict resolution. Built 11 side projects during those 4 years, 2 of which got real users.
C++AlgorithmsDistributed systems
Right now
What I'm up to.
Building
PromptKit v2
A redesigned prompt engineering toolkit with visual flow builder and team collaboration.
Reading
Shape Up
Ryan Singer's take on product development. Changing how I scope freelance projects entirely.
Obsessed with
WebGL shaders
Spending weekends learning GLSL. The rabbit hole is deep and I have no regrets.
Beyond the screen
When I'm not coding.
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Espresso
Dialing in a 27g shot at 6am before anyone else is awake. It's meditative.
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Guitar
10 years of playing, still can't do a proper barre chord. Still love it.
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Running
5am runs along the Seine. Best thinking time I've found. No headphones.
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Reading
32 books in 2024. Mix of technical, philosophy, and fiction. Always 3 on the go.
Currently reading
📐
Shape Up — Ryan Singer
🧠
Thinking in Systems — Meadows
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Project Hail Mary — Weir
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High Output Management — Grove
How I work
Principles I ship by.
01
Speed is a feature
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01
Every 100ms of latency costs conversion. I treat performance budgets the same way I treat design constraints — non-negotiable.
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02
Ship, then perfect
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02
Perfect is the enemy of shipped. I bias toward getting something real in front of users fast, then using their feedback to iterate toward excellent.
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03
Accessible by default
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03
Accessibility isn't a checklist item — it's good engineering. ARIA, keyboard nav, and contrast aren't afterthoughts in anything I build.
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04
Design is communication
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04
Every layout decision, color choice, and animation is sending a message. I make sure that message matches what the product needs to say.
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05
Own the outcome
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05
I don't hand off tickets and move on. I care about whether the thing I built actually worked — for the user and for the business.
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06
Bored by average
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06
I ask "what would make this memorable?" on every project. Not for vanity — because users remember and return to things that feel exceptional.
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My belief
The best interfaces are the ones you don't notice. But getting there requires obsessing over every pixel, every interaction, and every millisecond — until the effort becomes invisible and the experience feels like magic.
— Jordan Smith
Speaks 3 languages ·Makes espresso at 6am ·32 books in 2024 ·Has never used Bootstrap ·Runs 5km every morning ·First PC was a Pentium II ·Tab indentation stan ·Owns 3 mechanical keyboards ·Paris local since 1998 ·Speaks 3 languages ·Makes espresso at 6am ·32 books in 2024 ·Has never used Bootstrap ·Runs 5km every morning ·First PC was a Pentium II ·Tab indentation stan ·Owns 3 mechanical keyboards ·Paris local since 1998 ·