Calvin Freitas has been based in North Idaho since 2020 and previously lived in the front-range of Colorado and the Seattle area. By trade, he's a software engineer and has been building websites for nearly as long as the World Wide Web has been around (that's what the www in URLs means if you're wondering).
Cal has served in roles including Principal Front-End Engineer, Staff Engineer, and Engineering Manager.
Cal owns and operates Swarzy and provides his website consulting, contracting, and optimization skills to startups, SMBs, and enterprises. He worked at Amazon for ~9 years on Seller Central, Amazon UI, and the Amazon Detail Page.
One of the best things I've found about vibe coding is that it becomes cheaper to experiment. Certainly not free—if you've paid the price for Opus 4.5 usage beyond your included plan limits, you know what I mean. But much cheaper in terms of time for planning, execution, and delivery than similar features would have taken in the past.
You could say it's a night and day difference in how engineers...
For most of the life of this blog (since 2008), it has been powered by WordPress. In olden days, I organized WordPress conferences and meetups in Seattle.
WordPress served me well for a long time...
When I was most recently in the process of interviewing at the start of 2025, it became useful to have an up-to-date and efficient front-end stack for coding interviews. This came in handy both for...
I recently spent time updating a few Swarzy websites including Psalmlist and Swarzy.com. (Yes, this is how I spent my time off for Veteran's Day Observed.) I've always found that having and working on...
Today, I started a full-time position as Lead Front-End Engineer at PublicSquare - America's Marketplace. I'm excited!
I'm the first full-time front-end engineer on a new team and will have the...