Kudos

I wanted to send a quick thank you note as you've helped me grow a ton here. I remember I was still early in my tech career and you would pair with me often, I learned so much from those sessions and felt lucky to have that time. And even after that you'd pop in threads with helpful notes, and over time I learned that that level of guidance was not typical of higher level engineers with your busy schedules. You helped create a culture in Web, and now beyond, that makes learning and working fun more fun and engaging. So thank you!

I know you had a big hand in the signal work but seriously it's so well designed

Great job rallying the troops and running this presentation Here is the summary of the feedback I got from my peers:

• The revised format was very well received and aligned with what attendees were hoping to get from these reviews.
• The session was viewed as highly valuable because it focused on meaningful engineering insights and discussions rather than just reporting metrics.
• The presentation of trends and the context behind the metrics resonated strongly with attendees, helping create a more insightful discussion than simply reviewing point-in-time values.
• The engineering examples and lessons shared throughout the review were seen as practical and applicable to other teams.
• Several attendees specifically called out the quality of the presentations and the depth of technical content.
• The overall session was described as one of the strongest examples of the current Engineering Review format.

I'd be remiss if I didnt thank you for all the brainstorming and problem solving along the path of this project. So...Thank you for all the help and guidance along the way!

you're willingness to work with us (and others) that did need help never ceases to amaze me. i appreciate you Anders

Anders Johnson has demonstrated exceptional performance as a Principal Engineer in 2025, delivering transformational impact through his leadership of the [project] initiative. Anders evolved his leadership approach in 2025, operating as a "Principal of Principals" who strategically delegates, guides behind the scenes, and carefully selects the highest-impact technical problems to drive directly— demonstrating mature judgment about where to apply his unique expertise.

Thank you Anders! I'll miss working with you too and stepping away from [project]. I really admire you as an engineer and leader, so thank you for all the collaboration and mentorship over the past year or so!

Today happens to be my last evening with Target You are one of the nicest persons I have met. And an amazing engineer too It was great getting to see you in so many different ways. Thank you for everything :heart::wave: Wish you the best! @[person] is a great fan of yours. He has mentioned it multiple times that you are one of the reasons he is choosing to stay at Target :heart: :heart: Thank you for being so awesome and helpful!!

Hey, just wanted to give you a heads up that I’m leaving Target next month. My last day is 11/7. Thanks for all the mentorship over the years!

I've had the opportunity to collaborate with Anders across several large-scale projects, and his impact as a Principal Engineer is consistently exceptional. He brings a rare combination of technical depth, architectural clarity, and an ability to navigate the nuances of complex systems with ease. Anders has a strong sense for scalable solutions: not only in how systems are designed, but in how teams can work effectively within them. He's deeply committed to improving developer experience and streamlining workflows, often building the tools that make that possible. A great example is the GitHub/ Slack integration he developed to simplify multi-team pull request reviews, which quickly became part of our standard process. Beyond his technical leadership, Anders provides direction that aligns long-term architectural goals with day-to-day execution. His judgment, precision, and focus on sustainable engineering practices make him a cornerstone of any team he's part of. It's a privilege to work alongside him and learn from his approach to both technology and collaboration.

LOVE me some [project]! Great presentation this morning slightly smiling face

Nice work @Anders.Johnson and @[person]. [project] FTW :muscle:

nice job, that was an awesome demo

Typical lifecycle for these things is:

1. Anders sees a need and builds a powerful tool to solve it
2. I use said tool, but it makes my eyes bleed
3. I add CSS to the tool

Great update on [project]. I feel like I've been out of the loop on it for awhile. Looks like things are coming along.

Joking aside, great presentation @Anders.Johnson! Lots of engagement in Zoom chat.

@Anders.Johnson and @[person] - great presentation. Thanks for putting this together at such a short notice and driving it.

Thank you so much @Anders.Johnson Getting L4 mentorship by you feels like couple of months ago . Thank you for always inspiring me and everyone. I have always been a big admirer of your work and aspire to be more like you . A lot of us do. Thanks Anders

Today’s was last day at Target, and I just wanted to say a big thank you for all your support and guidance. I’ve learned a lot working with you — especially around [project], and it’s truly helped me grow professionally.

Hi [person], [person], [person] As we wrap up Q1, I just wanted to send a quick (but very heartfelt ) shoutout for Anders. Since Foundations team started ramping up on [project], Anders has been an absolute lifesaver — guiding us through all the chaos, helping us fill the backlog with the right work and generally being the wise voice of reason when we needed it most. He's been answering my endless questions, keeping our direction sharp, and doing it all with the patience of a saint and the efficiency of... well, a Principal Engineer who might also be a bot/s :joy: . Honestly, we’d still be somewhere between “mild confusion” and “full panic” without him. Thank you Anders for being an incredible partner :thank_you_heart:. It genuinely makes a massive difference to have a partner with the same drive. I am looking forward to working with you and help you to make even more impact on the [project] world this year. Just wanted to make sure you all heard it from me: he's been awesomely outstanding. :raised_hands:

Hey [person] — thanks so much for the kind words! We all know how incredible Anders is, and it’s always great to hear that echoed by partner teams :blush:. [project] is a key digital priority for us, and having your team and Anders driving it forward is a big part of its success. Looking forward to a strong and continued partnership!

I am amazed at the way you are able to keep track of about a million different things in this space Well, your contributions are really amazing and I truly appreciate that along with all the help and patience you have!!

And thanks for all your valuable input! I always feel better about a meeting when you are there in the participants!

You've been an amazing resource throughout the entire [[project]] project. Seems like you have your hands on pretty much every moving part of this effort which is impressive to say the least.

You showed up really well in that convo, great job.

Positive feedback from you means a lot because I really respect your skillset and value you bring to Target.

I appreciate that @Anders.Johnson - it would be impossible to send enough go/recognize to represent how much you do for web/digital and now inspire. Happy to be in the same org as a force of nature like yourself :+1:

Every time I do something, theres already a draft or closed Anders PR doing it first :slightly_smiling_face:

I’ve always appreciated your side discussions though, I always took them as learning points.

I've noticed that there's been a lot of back and forth between you and PEs recently. I know those are psychologically exhausting but I wanted you to know that I think you are handling it very well :clap:

That meeting was SO HELPFUL!! :mindblown: . I think these knowledge share sessions are 100% needed so we don't end up having to resolve complicated stuff in slack threads, which is almost always a slog,

please do know that I truly do value your honest feedback. No one else in this entire org gives feedback like you do. I hope you feel like you're getting a break from carrying that burden alone but know that it's always top of mind for me and my DRs. Thanks for all that you've done for us these past few years

[person] said today Digital is at the center of Target's growth strategy. I think its very unlikely that could even be possible without your tireless contributions, ideas and commitment to making things better, faster, and more valuable. You're truly a force to be reckoned with, and we are incredibly lucky to have you on our side of the ring. You're the Rocky of programming!

Things look positive so far. Just verifying it fully fixed the issue with the cypress tests, but your suggestion was very helpful, so thank you! Also, as a general side note, thank you for all your help over the past year. There was zero mentorship for frontend engineers on my teams at Lockheed, which was really difficult and frustrating to me, and I really appreciate you

I appreciate your involvement in our space - our team really likes working with you.

hey thanks so much Anders really appreciate it! and congrats on the baby :smile: !! always a pleasure working with you and excited to see what we will cook up next

Target Bot Platform (TBP) has fully rolled out! The decommission of Botify SpeedWorkers on July 17th completes the full rollout of TBP on web... Cost Savings: $1.2m reduction in vendor costs in FY2024; Efficiency: >95% reduction in unnecessary bot crawls on backend resources like [backend]... Shoutout to @Anders.Johnson for defining bot optimizations for the Next.JS migration.

Thank YOU! That was a fun conversation and they did have great questions and you had awesome, relatable answers and great advice. Way to start us off! I think this energy will continue as we speak to other PEs.

@[person] @Anders.Johnson Excellent presentation and visuals today. This is a hard topic to bring to life for our partners from non-tech areas and I thought you both hit the mark right on! Nice job :clap:

Great job team! It was great to see the engagement in the chat... I want to give a special shout out to [person], [person], [person], [person] and Anders for their work to pull this perspective (and supporting strategy) together.

Good job Anders & [person]! Good primer and levelset for future shareouts and track progress!

Hey Anders. Heading out now but just wanted to say it has been an absolute pleasure working with you over the years. If there was one person I’ve learnt the most from at Target, that would be you. So thanks for all you do and hope to stay in touch :slightly_smiling_face: Good luck ! :wave:

Anders, Huge Thanks for your role in evaluating the body of work for this PE promotion. Your feedback was well-structured into focus areas and precise with a scoring system. It was key to helping my leadership get an unbiased view and make a final decision. I'll be sending more reviews your way in the future 😄 Thanks again, [person]

I always appreciate having him there and I'm not going to question more access to his brain :brain:

it's helped me feel more comfortable asking him questions, also made it easier to address the git extras issue, and i believe it is overall useful to have someone who has insight on how multiple web teams function to ease collaboration and identify pain points across multiple teams.

having Anders as a fly on the wall during our standup has been helpful when questions arise. I trust Anders is managing his time in the best way. The more that he knows what’s going on with our team - the better I think he can help us coordinate with other STOF teams and prioritize tech initiatives

Hey there, it would appear i ghosted you on a few slack conversations yesterday - my apologies, yesterday was a ridiculously busy meeting day and i had a hell of time keeping up with Slack. Thank you for all of your help, expertise, and how graciously you engaged with the Basket Building team. I really do appreciate everything you do.

Hello [person], There is a joke that regular people have 24 hours in a day, but [person] has 48. The same is true for Anders. He is often solving multiple complex problems we have on the web. He still finds time for mentorship and other ways of helping engineers. I know him from the days when he was a lead engineer. He was helping folks then and he is helping folks now too. He is highly skilled in his craft and shares his knowledge generously. He listens carefully, asks questions to understand better and then provides appropriate help. Many engineers looks up to him (few may even be idolizing him as well). He is also the most visible and accessible web Principal Engineer. Here is what [person] from my team has to say about him: "Thanks for all the help the Web Team when every the team has an issue. He also helps with getting new performance improvements and also encouraging other team members on different ways to improve performance." Wishing him the very best! -[person]

Liked: Kudos to Anders for being almost everywhere Stop: Needing Anders to be everywhere

Hi [person], I just thought I could share some of my great experiences and feedback about my mentorship with @Anders.Johnson. Anders helped me understand how one could work on career progression technically as well as other required soft skills. I have been asking him too many questions, but he is so calm and listens to me without any interpretation and helped me out with great answers. Through our mentorship, Anders had good answers and solutions for everything that needed to be addressed. I’ve learned things that would never have crossed my mind, His professional career growth advice was great, and I am sure it going to help me in the future. Anders, I’d like to thank you for your support and kindness. You are a great teacher, leader, and friend. Thank you so much for all that you've done for being a good mentor and guiding me on the right path.

BTW, thank you so much for being so helpful to folks. Everyone who has interacted with you have great things to say for you. You listen patiently, you give enough time and have great suggestions. You have a big fan base in MPLS and in India!! :slightly_smiling_face:

You did a great job yesterday on the call. I appreciate that. Wish we had more people like you sometimes.

Special thank you to Anders Johnson for sharing his passion in performance across all Digital - levels and teams don't pose boundaries for Anders!

Anders has been such a great cheerleader for all of Web and the engineers that support it. He has put in a lot of effort to ensure people get recognized for their great work and lends an ear when people voice their concerns.

Even though Anders was never directly charged with driving performance work on Web, he's proactively become a foundation for resources, support, promotion, and active contribution in the Web performance space. Thank you for lighting up our performance community with your passion and fire. It's pleasantly infectious!

You're an ANIMAL Anders!!! I'm sure you get a lot of praises and recognition but wanted to give you shout out anyways especially for your major involvement and contributions to the performance AND SEO space. It's really amazing how you wear the PE hat, PM hat, TPM hat, data analyst hat, QA hat, every. single. day. You go dude!

@[person] Realizing I never responded to this. Mentorship with @Anders.Johnson was great, whether it was chatting career growth, particular code/org challenges, or just shooting the breeze. I got a lot out of our chats and setting goals. It’s also great that Target/web/you guys have devoted so much time/resources to a more official mentorship setting. At my last job I had a “mentor” but it was very informal and didn’t help all that much. So I’ll definitely be signing up again and again (there’s no limit right? :sweat_smile: )

You did a truly excellent job presenting. Explaining the current situation, the complications that exist, the questions you asked yourself, and the answers you tested out. You brought us along in your process and opened it up for focused questions and curiosity. I'm super impressed. No toes were stepped on. I hope you heard the excitement and energy coming from the team! If anything, you've given [person] & [person] a new angle to come at the zip code work with – focused on performance enhancements

Anders is an amazing engineer, mentor and a team player. I have always seen Anders being on top of things, be it a tech query, production issue, mentorship, cultural initiatives or just DR routines. Anders has been one of most productive engineer with a very high output and he has delivered many tech enhancement and features this year. Anders was promoted to PE around the 2nd half of the year with a clear goal to push [project] out to the production. Anders certainly went above and beyond in creating the outcome that was expected which was to start the ramp pre-peak. [project] was a time sensitive, and a complex migration but Anders really pushed hard to make it happen in the committed timelines.

Hey Anders - I just wanted to tell you that I have appreciated your insights and questions the last couple of days in the planning meetings. Sadly we’re victims of time. Don’t let up though!

Hey - Good discussion this am. You did a nice job explaining. and thanks for adding the context on [person]. I thought you covered it well - he drives lots of stuff. ... no - you did great! it is good to speak up

for their incredible work on the site-top-of-funnel migration. the scope, speed and quality at which they are delivering a critical milestone for the web organization in simply amazing. fantastic cross org collaboration to drive home this migration! the finish line is within site!

Anders is known for his deep technical knowledge of industry practices combined with his responsiveness and desire to level up not only his, but every other engineers’ productivity. Through his many presentations, tools, OSS contributions, RFCs, and DX implementations, Anders’ has always been at the forefront of bringing efficiencies to the masses.

As the Lead developer in the top of funnel space for years, Anders has cultivated one of the most efficient teams during his time at Target. While Anders himself is by far and away to largest contributor every year to Web repositories (4.5k+ Target git contributions in 2020, on track to go over that this year), his direct teammates – no matter the level - are also consistently in the top 10 as well, largely due to his insights, support and guidance.

Over the years at Target Anders has been consistently placed in critical and high impact situations, and has delivered every time. Anders continually handles large scale projects that affect not just the Web Organization but all Digital.

From there Anders was placed on, and has stayed on, the team(s) responsible for Top of Funnel core functionalities. He has been front and center for most complex features from 2018 to today. Whether that be [project], [project], [project] or now the Site Top of Funnel replatform, Anders has always been entrusted to lead some of the most critical and complex work that happens on target.com.

Beyond the direct impact Anders’ has had on delivering critical outcomes, Anders has contributed greatly to tooling, developer experience, open source, and education among the Web organization. There are many more tools, ranging from simple bookmarklets to full fledged apps that Anders has developed for Target engineers. Needless to say, spreading efficiency and productivity are always at the forefront of his mind.

Anders’ strengths are in his deep technical aptitude, his rapid ideation and iteration, and his strive towards efficiency, productivity. Through this he also elevates those around him to the same aptitudes.

Anders can own a system and deliver results at a speed which is paralleled by few. Many engineers that I've talked to will tell me 'Anders deserves a promotion because what he produces is unbelievable'.

When he dives into a domain, he goes all in and really masters that domain. This is easily demonstrated with top-of-funnel, and even before with build-a-box.

He is protective of his team and strives to be the best for them that he can. For example, he is constantly looking for ways to free his team from blockers and make their DevEx better.

He is great at working with partners like product, ux, etc. He knows how to leverage partners the right way and does it constantly.

Anders is seen as a technical leader within the team. His opinion has a lot of value and weight.

He thinks at a higher level than just getting a feature done. He approaches solutions from an architectural standpoint and often has the view of his own team as well as the web team in mind when making decisions. This leads to him involving himself in a lot of high level architecture and web team initiatives where he likes to be.

He also builds a lot of tooling as he finds a need, which goes above and beyond. This ends up benefiting the web org as well. This is a great example of how well he does of taking initiative on things when he sees the need, without needing to be asked.

My experience working with Anders has always been great. He communicates very well, has great ideas, demonstrates an in-depth understanding of his domain, a good listener and champion of doing the 'right thing'. His contributions to extending and improving our [project]] platform are unmatched. He brings good ideas and is easy to work with to come up with solutions that benefit everyone. He is passionate about what he thinks are the best ways to get things done with an open mindedness that makes working with him easy. We could use more engineers like Anders at Target.

Anders is an incredibly prolific lead engineer. He produces more code on web than anyone else in the org and has architected key features of target.com including [project], [project], and the top of funnel site migration. He’s an amplifier and un-blocker of other engineers through the tools and solutions he creates. He’s also very innovative, having created tools used by engineers and cross functional partners alike that simply create complex scenarios. His work inspires and challenges other engineers to be better.

Anders has been a great Web team member to work with during the [project] and [project] work. He has been an excellent partner for [backend] and always had great conversations interacting with him. Anders has always shared valuable and constructive feedback during [project] development which helped improve the [backend] tooling and provided value to all our clients. I have always valued his feedback and ideas/suggestions. [Backend] has a lot of features built-in that came out of requests/suggestions from Anders and have been widely used by our other clients. We had many design discussion sessions coming out of Anders ideas and have implemented them which greatly improved [backend]. He has also been an excellent face of the Web team and his [tool] has also been a great help for the other team members and business.

Anders is not only able to achieve a high output with quality, but his also able to constantly work towards improving everything from the developer experience to the quality of code that engineers write. He is not asked to do this he takes it upon himself to drive for continual improvement. This fact alone makes him a great lead engineer. From my perspective and experience it appears that Anders also has one of the deepest knowledge sets in our technology stack on all of web which he uses to constantly improve things. With all that in mind I think his greatest impact is constantly mentoring and teaching a wide variety of engineers across web. Whether it's in a PR, an impromptu zoom discussion, in person chat, or just showing energy and passion for improving things in more public forms. It all helps I think the Web org has been a success in part because of his efforts.

Anders works very well with his team and his partner teams. He is very code-focused but demonstrates the ability to understand the larger picture when discussing new capabilities. I have witnessed him leading meetings, challenging when appropriately and following up with partner teams in a timely fashion.

I’d very much like to see Anders receive a promotion. In working with him over the last few years, I believe he has already been operating at the next level and is more than deserving.

Anders is the 'Go To' guy for not only me and the team but the entire web engineering team, including app engineers. He is more than willing to jump in and figuring out complex areas of the code.

Over the last few years he has taken the lead on all the rewiring and re-platforming efforts needed. He naturally jumps in and immediately takes an active lead.

He is great at teaching, coaching and always takes time to explain, even in laymen terms to his PO. While he is the resident go to, he is also very good and saying when he doesn’t know. He then jumps in to learning and asking deep questions. He loves a good challenge and this is when I see him shine the most. The 'gnarlier' the better.

He has built user friendly tools for complex areas that allow PO, UX, engineers and anyone not familiar with the area to get live examples on the web site of the experience and the code that powers it. This tool is something that has been life changing in my day to day.

He is a great team player, not only is jumping into to help but in celebrating wins; the small ones and big ones.

He is great at giving compliments and recognition to his peers and to other partner teams.

Anders is a HUGE asset to this team, a joy to work with, a true team player inside and outside the team. I hope he is considered for a promotion.

One of Anders’ most laudable qualities is continuously striving to improve our engineering processes. On countless occasions he has gone out of his way to contribute code fixes, documentation updates and key features to many parts of the Web org not directly related to his work on the product team. He is incredibly involved in the Web Platform community channel helping with answering technical questions and guiding other engineers.

Anders embodies the curious nature that is such an important quality on large engineering teams. He is a strong voice in guiding the future technical direction of the team. He has opened multiple RFCs to propose changes to established processes and engineering practices that make other engineers’ lives easier.

Thank you @Anders.Johnson. I'm sure I definitely miss strong engineer like you. I learnt a lot from your PRs & Git. Hope our working path will meet in future.

anytime! and nice conversation.. and thanks for fixing the local-publish script converting yalc add to link. I think it will be huge for DX... @Anders.Johnson This works great! thank you! it saves a lot of time.

Anders has been an awesome partner in pushing some final facets above the grid work done, consulting in a new space, and also getting a scrappy test out the door on AUI.

I was lucky to get a chance to work with you and even manage you. You are an awesome engineer and great human being. maintain the energy and passion you have. Best of luck for everything.

Anders had a stellar year in 2020, leading a team of leads to complete a high priority site-wide major refactor to accommodate the [backend] replatform. This was a 7 month effort that saw Anders' contributions skyrocket from an already astronomical level. Not only that, but this ended up being one of the smoothest refactors and launches I have ever been a part of, with very very few issues found as traffic shifted over. Throughout this project Anders lead the architecture and implementation of new patterns to get [our current application] closer to New Web Platform guidelines, coding with the future in mind, while also making sure speed, scalability, and performance weren't compromised. In the coming year, I look forward to seeing Anders lead another extraordinary effort with the Site Top of Funnel migration, while also setting the standards for how we create stable and predictable releases on Web through his mocking solutions. I have no doubt this will be another break out year for Anders.

It's been really fun working with you. You are by far the most productive engineer I've ever seen! And you're always thinking of ways to improve and innovate

Anders is consistently considered one of the top performers on the Web team. When it comes to throughput and stream of rapid fire ideas he has no peer in the organization. That doesn't mean quality suffers. Anders is able to balance quick iteration, business needs, and architectural concerns together seamlessly, which makes him an incredibly powerful engineer. Because of these qualities, Anders is often a go-to for many initiatives and is a point of contact for Product & Engineering teams in and outside of Web. Anders has proven himself to be able to solve most anything he sets his mind to.