Hi I'm Joel Rivera. I am a software engineer under the United Healthcare umbrella - My current day to day consists of building webpages for United Healthcare's customers. My work primarily focuses on the coverage and benefits section for our medicare supplement (MedSupp), medicare and retirement (M&R), community and state (C&S), and all of our special needs plans (SNP).

Prior to UHC, I was a developer for Ready Responders - a company that performs at-home healthcare to provide safe convenient medical services in the comfort of the patient's home. My current day to day consists of building internal tools for everyone on the Ready Responder staff. From our customer experience reps, to our responders themselves. Given our current circumstances, I definitely love feeling that my work makes a huge difference.

Prior to Ready Responders, I was a software engineer for Codesmith – an educational tech company based in Los Angeles and New York. My day to day consisted of maintaining the public website and building out new features for the site's newest curriculum additions.

Contributing to open source is definitely a goal of mine and most recently I started a dev tool with a few other devs to test the interoperability between different microservices, testing both XML and JSON data types. The project was then added to an open source accelerator OS Labs. The team started with 4 engineers and to this day, there are 4 more engineers working on and maintaining the dev tool.

Prior to being an engineer, I originally studied business management and marketing at St. John's University. But while I was finishing grad school, I became very curious with technology and the ability it has to make something so subtle in our daily lives and changes it for the better. I love all things technology and all aspects of business.

Additionally, I have a passion for teaching and mentoring others learning to code. Currently at Codesmith I give lectures on JavaScript fundamentals, React, Node, Express, DOM manipulation and data structures. Occasionally, I teach public workshops at Build With Code called JavaScript: The Easy Parts focusing on variables, control flow, looping, functions, objects, HTML and CSS.

Outside of work, you'll find me dancing salsa somewhere or at a gym training. I love professional sports, especially basketball and also have an interest in men's fashion.