About Me

Last updated June 28, 2023

Hello. I am Nathan Longnecker. I’m a Principal Software Development Engineer at CarGurus.

I grew up in Lincoln, Massachusetts. I have two younger brothers, James and Paul.

I went to Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) for both undergraduate and graduate school. During college, I interned at Wayfair, and after college I worked for Vista (formerly Vistaprint) prior to CarGurus.

During my 7.5 years at Vista, aside from owning both static and dynamically generated web pages, npm packages, microservices, not-so-micro-services, and build & deploy systems, I also worked on projects focusing on optimizing for accessibility, web page performance, server performance, and SEO. Most recently, I was responsible for Vista’s product display pages and product option selection experiences, with my depth area in product option compatibility and selection.

I also wore a number of hats at Vista: in addition to being an engineer, I often filled team lead/architect, product management, and people management roles.

I am passionate about and invested in my own personal growth and the growth of those around me - I enjoy mentoring, being mentored, and am always open to feedback. I try to capture common problems I encounter and observe others encountering and document my solutions to them here, on my personal website. I am also particularly passionate about software architecture and system design. Additionally, I strive to be an a11y where I can, and started a “DEI Learning Circles” initiative at Vista that was eventually formalized and evangelized by the DEI team there.

Outside of work, I like to spend as much time as I can playing board games. My current favorite is Frosthaven. My other hobbies include walking/hiking, cooking, baking, reading, and playing video games. I also like to travel, and have visited 20 countries outside of the US, most recently Norway, which I visited in June 2023, shortly before starting at CarGurus!