Lukasz Brodowski

I am a Lead Software Engineer at The Walt Disney Company.

I work on the Core Web team responsible for building and maintaining our in-house React server-side rendered framework. This framework powers some of the most popular websites, including espn.com, abcnews.com, abc.com, nationalgeographic.com, disneynow.com, and more. As a team, our focus is on delivering a stable and performant framework that can handle the scale of these sites.

Recent achievements

A custom CSS-in-JS library

One of my proudest achievements is my work on our internal CSS-in-JS library. It's built from the ground up to support a runtime mode, a fully statically extractable mode (the same or fewer JS artifacts as CSS modules), and features fully atomic CSS. It was architected to support an internal multi-tenant design system React component library (say that 5 times fast). I was the core contributor and architect to the compiler and the runtime. Currently, it is used in production serving ABC News' article pages and soon will expand to other domains.

Improve developer experience

Another achievement I'm proud of is my work on the developer experience with our framework. In our last major release, I improved developer mode start-up times by 30x in our largest projects. These improvements were not just achieved by using something like swc-loader or esbuild; we still rely on Webpack and Babel. My changes include custom Webpack plugins and resolvers that allow for dynamic page entries, just-in-time building of assets, and a custom dev server for syncing server and client refreshes (HMR).

A custom React Reconciler for WebGL

I worked on creating a React Reconciler for WebGL so we can utilize React and our framework on low-end, over-the-top TV platforms (Tizen, WebOS, AndroidTV). The reconciler and add-on library featured on-demand frame rendering, custom spatial navigation, accessibility support, screen culling, lazy texture loading, and progressive enhancement of features based on device capabilities. As a demo, I recreated a portion of the Watch ESPN TV app and it achieved a stable 30fps on a low-end 2017 Samsung TV running Tizen 3.0 (Chrome 47 2015).