Hello 👋. I'm Kyle Pennell.

I am a Solutions Engineer focused on geospatial analyis and visualization. I currently work at CARTO.

I need to update this site, please see my Linkedin page for a more updated version of my work experience.


Content Creation + Marketing Experience

My ~5 years of content experience has been primarily focused on creating SEO content to educate buyers and generate leads. Here are a couple top-level highlights from content marketing efforts of which I’ve been a part:

  • Created the new Aprinnova website and helped them increase traffic 4x over 8 months.
  • Created dozens of pieces of renewables-related content (and backlinks via guestposts) which grew PowerScout traffic 500% and Domain Authority from 37 to 40 in 5 months.
  • Grew appendTo traffic 800% over 10 months with a wide variety of content and tutorials on web development.

Web Development Experience

I develop websites and webapps. The goal of many of my projects is to help people get outside, see live music, and connect with other people. I’m a big believer is using the web to get off the web.
In 2019, I build most sites and apps using React, Firebase, Gatsby, Wordpress (with the Avada theme), the Google Sheets API and Material-UI. I also enjoy teaching other people how to make web apps and have written several dozen tutorials on various programming topics. You can explore my web dev projects below:

Content Portfolio

Using the Google Sheets API With Gatsby for Creating Fast Sites With Simple Data Sources

Here's a tutorial I wrote for Gatsby's blog on how to use Google Sheets with Gatsby.

AirNYT: Clone Airbnb with New York Times Travel Data

This was a mega-tutorial series I wrote on building an AirBnb clone using React, Material-UI, and Firebase. As you can see in portfolio, I love building map products (and want to make it easier for others to do the same).

I made an adventure map for Oaxaca, Mexico and here's what I learned

Here's a writeup on Dev.to about what I learned while making OaxacaExplorer.

ES6 Arrow Functions: Fat and Concise Syntax in JavaScript

It gives me great joy that this post consistently ranks #1 or #2 for ‘fat arrow’. This article was one of several technical posts I wrote for SitePoint (it later got included in an ebook). I think it encapsulates my writing style of knowing how to balance the nitty-gritty details with the more big picture perspective. Based off the comments and how much it gets linked to, it seems people quite liked it.

2018 Solar Panel Costs Guide (written for PowerScout, which has pivoted to zesty.ai)

This solar panel cost guide was written to specifically target the most important ‘high-intent’ solar SEO keywords around cost and pricing. Enriching the content and building links did seem to help boost it’s SEO ranking 7 places but we couldn’t quite get to page 1.

Build Fast and Elegant Sites with Gatsby, NetlifyCMS and Material-UI

This is a two-part tutorial series I wrote on how to build really fast sites using Gatsby, NetlifyCMS, and Material-UI. I tried to simplify the process of learning these tools as much as I could.

DevOps Simplified for Non-Technical People

This is a large ebook-sized guide I wrote and edited about the DevOps technology ecosystem in 2016. I hired and managed five writers to help with the project.

Front-End Development Explained for Non-Developers

This was a blog series I wrote to make web development technologies easy to understand for non-technical people. Be it that most DevelopIntelligence client contacts are non-technical people in charge of technical training, one of our jobs was constantly helping them understand the technologies their developers were learning.

DevelopIntelligence Developer Learning Survey Report

This learning report is key white paper DevelopIntelligence uses for lead generation and during the sales process. It helps our clients understand what, how, and why software developers want to learn (and receive training).

For this report, we included or own data as well as several other industry leaders’ survey reports.

Learn to learn, better

This was an article series I wrote at Udemy (a while back now) that focuses on the meta skills around learning. I find this such a fascinating topic and am constantly working on my own learning skills.

Web Development Portfolio

Berlin Music Map

I have freelanced remotely from Berlin a couple times and thoroughly enjoyed their music scene. I made this live music map exploration interface using Gatsby, React, React-Window, Google-Maps-React and the Soundcloud API. It is similar to Yay Music Map (a previous project) but features pages for each show and venue (while the media player keeps playing as the pages are changed). It is incredibly fast thanks to Gatsby.

Aprinnova Website Redo

Constructed a new Wordpress website for Aprinnova with user logins, PDF downloads, restricted content access, and Salesforce-connected forms with custom fields.

AirNYT

This was an AirBnb clone I built with React/Material-UI/FireBase for a tutorial series. It allows users to explore eight years of New York Times Travel Recommendations.

AcroTags

This simple AcroYoga video discovery app was made for a tutorial I wrote for Gatsby.

OaxacaExplorer

I mapped 95% of Oaxaca's Biking and Hiking Routes and made a site dedicated to helping people explore the outdoors in this Mexican state. The digital map is made with React-leaflet and the paper map was made with QGIS.

Chemistry Cannabis Dispensary Location Map

Map (using Google Sheets as a CMS) that I built for cannabis company, Chemistry. Features Google Places Auto-Complete and allows for filtering based off the map edges (the list updates according to dragging the map).

Yay Music Map

I scraped over 100 music venue calendars in four cities, combined the artist data with Spotify + SoundCloud, mapped it all with React and Google Maps and made a pretty dang cool live music discovery tool! Lesson learned: Focus more on the sustainable data scraping vs. the interface. The constant manual data cleaning burned me out. [Dummy Data / Defunct]

appendTo with Gatsby and NetlifyCMS

This demo is nothing too impressive itself, but it's built upon Gatsby (blazing fast) and NetlifyCMS (allows non-technical users to update the content). I'm really excited about the JAMStack

Get In Touch

  • Email

    kpennell at gmail dot com