Gabriel Harlan — UX-Minded Front-End Engineer
UX-minded front-end engineer who turns big ideas into easily accessible, human-centered interfaces.
Graduating Dec 2026 · open to UX & front-end roles · Bloomington, IN or remote
I'm a senior Informatics student at Indiana University, minoring in Human-Centered Computing and Web Design. I like turning big ideas into clean, accessible, human-centered interfaces, and I care about building things that feel good for everyone to use, not just things that look good. I spent the last couple years leading a campus IT support team at IU; on weekends I'm underground with the Bloomington Indiana Grotto, which is exactly how the cave field-guide app below got started.
Selected work
- TRACTION Rep Console (2026) — Designed and prototyped a sales-enablement console for Tire Rack retention reps. An outbound engine scores every customer on LTV × churn × signal recency and builds a suppression-filtered, frequency-capped daily queue — handing each rep a ranked lead with a why-now reason, the customer’s cross-channel history, and an AI-matched cart ready to place. Unifies AI-chat, SMS, and call history with AI transcript summaries, and closes every outcome back to the data spine.
- TRACI SMS Gateway (2026) — Shipped solo to production as an Innovation & AI intern: a service that lets any customer text Tire Rack's TRACI AI tire agent — live on Google Cloud Run over Twilio. A Python/FastAPI backend with a text-driven vehicle picker (year/make/model → factory tire size), async workers so slow AI replies never time out, Redis-backed sessions, TCPA-compliant opt-out and per-phone rate limiting, keyless CI/CD, and 90 tests.
- Karst (2026) — Shipped as both a live web app and an Android build: a caver's field guide to the wild and show caves of southern Indiana's karst country. Built on Next.js + Firebase around a privacy-first map that fuzzes sensitive cave locations, dead-reckoning trails you record once and follow in with AR or back out by compass, grotto groups, a community field guide, and a bat / White-Nose Syndrome conservation guide.
- ITIT — IT Inventory Tracker (2025–2026) — Delivered as a senior capstone with a four-person Scrum team: inventory tracking for small businesses that’s less error-prone than spreadsheets and far cheaper than enterprise systems. Pairs a physical IoT tracker with a web app for deployments, locations, and items — plus CSV export and Google login.
- Corne 42 LP Split Wireless Keyboard (2022–2026) — A split, wireless, low-profile Corne I built by hand and now type on every day — 42 ortholinear keys on custom ZMK firmware. Bluetooth profiles, per-half OLED screens, a removable hotswap controller, and magnetic USB-C ports. Tuned Choc switches, blank 3D-printed caps, soldered and flashed from scratch.
- Richard Blenz Nature Preserve (2025) — Redesigned and shipped for my I360 Web Design final: a responsive rebuild of the National Speleological Society's Buckner Cave preserve site. Hand-coded HTML/CSS/JS with an animated nav, a photo slideshow, and accordion geology & biology sections, all built around cave photography I shot on-site.
Field notes
- Working without a net — Ten weeks took me from group class projects to shipping a service strangers can text and handing leadership a design a team will build from — both on my own. It rewired what I think “finished” means.
- Designing for a job I’ve never had — I’ve never studied sales or worked a sales floor — then I designed a console for the reps who do.
- The knob that wouldn’t turn — A rotary knob on my keyboard should have been an afternoon. Instead it took four years, three builds, and a whole stack of wrong assumptions before it finally turned.
- Fuzzing cave locations — Designing privacy into a map when the honest answer is “I can’t show you that.”
- The plumbing is the product — What building an SMS gateway for an AI tire agent taught me about where the real work lives.
- What leading an IT team taught me about UX — Two years of watching people hit walls in real time is the best usability lab I’ve had.
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