I architect interfaces and the platforms underneath them — design systems, member centers, internationalization, CI/CD, and tools engineers rely on.
2.6M+
2.6M+ weekly downloads
10
10 npm packages
20+
20 years
138k
138k reached on Stack Overflow
// shipped at scale
rtl-detect · npm · VS Code · i18n
About
I am Shadi Abu Hilal, a Principal UI Engineer at Broadcom. I spent years as a Senior Principal Architect at Yahoo and Verizon Media, designing web systems used by millions of people.
Most of my open source comes from production problems: locale direction, RTL CSS, build pipelines, and tools other people can pick up in a minute. rtl-detect began as a helper. It became a dependency.
I write on Stack Overflow when a precise answer will outlive a meeting. I speak Arabic and English, and I am based in California.
Languages spoken: Arabic, English
Systems & architecture
Engineering
Leadership & process
Principal UI Engineer
Broadcom
2024 — now
Palo Alto, CA, USA
Senior Principal Architect
Yahoo Inc.
2021 — 2023
Mountain View, CA, USA
Senior Principal Architect
Verizon Media
2019 — 2021
San Jose, CA, USA
Principal Software Development Engineer
Verizon Media
2019 — 2019
Sunnyvale, CA, USA
B.Sc. in Computer Science
Princess Sumaya University for Technology
Amman, Jordan
Best Poster — TechPulse 2012 (Yahoo)
Technical paper and demo on advanced image processing with HTML5 Canvas at Yahoo's annual technical conference.
Super Star Team Award — 2011 (Yahoo)
Yahoo's highest team honor. Built Helwa — 10 million users, 100M page views per month.
Method and System for Rendering Advertisements within an Application on a Mobile Device
US IPCOM000243103D · Issued Sep 15, 2015
Latest work projects
VMware vDefend SSP at Broadcom today. Member centers, privacy dashboards, and design systems across Yahoo, AOL, TechCrunch, Engadget, and more.
01/Platform
Broadcom
Principal UI Engineer at Broadcom — architecting the frontend for SSP management and security workflows.
VMware vDefend Security Services Platform — the operational hub for vDefend across VMware Cloud Foundation. Centralizes security intelligence, network detection and response, malware prevention, and related services in a scalable platform.
02/Platform
Yahoo
React with internal Web UI components.
Member Center 2.0 — the account experience for Yahoo, AOL, TechCrunch, and other Verizon Media brands. I architected the frontend, built core standards, and designed flexible CI/CD for the repos.
Multi-brand: replace yahoo in the URL with aol, techcrunch, engadget, or other supported brands.
03/Design system
Yahoo
Themeable design system used across product teams.
Denali 2.0 — rebuilt from scratch to fix the single source of truth in the design system. I architected the core and the React implementation.
04/Platform
Yahoo
Architected the project and implemented core code.
Privacy Dashboard for Yahoo, AOL, TechCrunch, and other brands. Java frontend server plus React SPA for performance, UX, and fewer API calls.
Multi-brand: replace yahoo in the URL with aol, techcrunch, engadget, or other supported brands.
05/Toolkit
Yahoo
Consistent designs across large product surfaces. Not open source.
Internal library at Yahoo — reusable React web components (RTL, themes) and a utils package with REST client, route manager, and extensions to useful libraries.
Internal at Yahoo — not publicly available.
Open source
01/npm
2.6 million weekly downloads. 295 dependents.
A small library that answers one question correctly: is this locale right-to-left? Hundreds of packages depend on it. That is what infrastructure looks like when it is done well.
02/Extension
Context without the essay. VS Code Marketplace.
Pick a file, a line, or a live element in the page and send it into Claude Code. Built so an engineer can show the model what they mean instead of describing it.