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Nick Day, UI, UX, and Front-End Developer in Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom
Nick Day

UI, UX, and Front-End Developer in Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom

Member since July 29, 2019
Nick is a front-end specialist who also has over a decade of back-end experience. He’s highly committed to quality and use of best practices and enjoys crafting simple solutions to complex problems.
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Portfolio

  • The Club HQ
    Elasticsearch, AWS CloudFront, Less, Jest, Galaxy, Meteor, MongoDB, Node.js...
  • Inclusively
    Material-UI, Node.js, Heroku, JSON Web Tokens (JWT), REST, React Query...
  • Social News Desk
    Zeplin, ESLint, Git, AWS Lambda, MongoDB, Sass, Redux, React, JavaScript

Experience

Location

Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom

Availability

Full-time

Preferred Environment

Git, WebStorm, IntelliJ IDEA

The most amazing...

...project I've worked on was a web application that was periodically used on a live television show in front of millions of viewers.

Employment

  • Co-founder

    2017 - PRESENT
    The Club HQ
    • Developed all aspects of the site from the front to the back end.
    • Created a platform that allows users to create a progressive web application for their sports club or team.
    • Designed a simple architecture to support the addition of multiple sports and localisations.
    Technologies: Elasticsearch, AWS CloudFront, Less, Jest, Galaxy, Meteor, MongoDB, Node.js, React, JavaScript

  • Web Engineer

    2020 - 2020
    Inclusively
    • Helped people with disabilities find suitable jobs. I was tasked to take the existing WordPress site and to rewrite and expand on the features using the React ecosystem.
    • Worked closely with a designer and a back-end developer to implement the landing site, account creation and profile management, and job search and application features.
    • Used Material UI for the component styling, React Context API for the UI state management, and React Query to handle the REST API requests and server cache.
    • Used Jira to break down the different features into workable tasks and to provide time estimates in order to meet the broad requirements for the project.
    • Worked with and mentored five US college students who worked part-time on the project as part of one of their courses.
    Technologies: Material-UI, Node.js, Heroku, JSON Web Tokens (JWT), REST, React Query, React Context API, React, JavaScript

  • Web Engineer

    2019 - 2019
    Social News Desk
    • Redeveloped and extended an existing product using React, Redux, and modern CSS during a three-month contract that allows news stations to create and interact with social media feeds live on air.
    • Led the implementation of pixel-perfect styling from designs provided in Zeplin.
    • Created a component structure and related styles that would allow straightforward reuse and extension for different branding.
    • Developed SASS mixins for the creation of smooth, reusable CSS animations.
    Technologies: Zeplin, ESLint, Git, AWS Lambda, MongoDB, Sass, Redux, React, JavaScript

  • Lead Web Engineer

    2015 - 2019
    Metail
    • Led the front and middle-tier development for all of Metail's client-facing UIs.
    • Advocated for and led the change of stack and architecture of Metail's primary product, a virtual fitting room plugin for clothing retailer's websites. This expanded the plugin from being desktop-only to being mobile and native-ready.
    • Layed down the foundation in new codebases to ease local development and provide seamless routes for deploying to staging and production environments.
    • Defined and led the implementation of a JavaScript API to allow ourselves and our clients to perform integrations of the plugin.
    • Led the development of REST APIs to support both customers and retailers.
    • Led both front and back-end performance management and improvements. This included latency and payload of the API requests and front-end resources (including optimizing for the initial payload), reducing the number of requests, and resource caching.
    • Used AWS services to deploy front and middle-tier components to provide our services quickly to tens of thousands of daily users across the world.
    • Worked closely with project managers and designers to outline the technical feasibility of mockups and designs, provide time estimates, and break up high-level requirements into workable tasks.
    • Developed and mentored junior and senior engineers.
    • Acted as the Metail's first off-site developer, helping to outline an effective strategy for remote working. The team subsequently grew to be 50% remote.
    Technologies: BrowserStack, Grunt, ESLint, Less, Re-frame, Clojure, ClojureScript, Java, React, JavaScript

  • Web Tech Lead

    2013 - 2015
    Metail
    • Defined the architecture for, and led the development of an iframe-based, customizable, localizable virtual fitting room plugin for retailer's desktop sites.
    • Led the development for standalone fitting room sites, such as that for our collaboration with ITV’s This Morning, where it was used periodically on live television and for which we were nominated for the BAFTA for Digital Creativity in 2014.
    • Defined and led the implementation of the build, continuous integration and deployment processes for all front and middle-tier components.
    • Helped build, line managed and led the technical team for the development of Metail’s fitting room UIs.
    • Helped define job specifications, defined tech tests, reviewed candidate CVs and performed technical interviews.
    Technologies: Jenkins, Mercurial, Jetty, Maven, Java, Grunt, Less, Jasmine, Marionette.js, Backbone.js, CoffeeScript, JavaScript

  • Developer | Products

    2010 - 2013
    Metail
    • Led the re-implementation and expansion of Metail’s first prototype virtual fitting room.
    • Advocated for and implemented the move from Flash to an HTML/JavaScript solution.
    • Replaced the company’s holding page with a WordPress-backed website.
    Technologies: WordPress, PHP, Maven, Java, Backbone.js, JavaScript

  • Ph.D. Candidate and Postdoctoral Research Assistant

    2004 - 2010
    University of Cambridge
    • Developed an open-source software to aid capture, processing, and dissemination of chemical data within and between institutions.
    • Created a self-updating website that found, aggregated and republished crystallographic data from peer-reviewed journals in a more reusable, semantic form.
    • Automated the selection of datasets from the aforementioned website and subsequent high-throughput performance and analysis of quantum mechanical calculations using a university-wide grid.
    Technologies: Atom, RDF, XML, Java, Clojure, JavaScript, CSS, HTML

Experience

  • The Club HQ (Development)
    https://www.theclubhq.com

    I'm a co-founder and sole developer of The Club HQ, which aims to support grassroots sports clubs by providing a cheap, easy way for them to create a modern website to manage and engage with their members. The site will soon support multiple sports and localizations.

  • Metail's Virtual Fitting Room (Development)
    https://metail.com/

    While I worked at Metail, the primary product was a JavaScript plugin for the clothing retailer's sites. This was a helper that followed the user around the retailer's site and allowed them to create a 3D version of themselves so that they could see what clothes looked like on their body and receive recommendations on which size to buy.

    I defined the architecture and led the front and middle-tier development for this plugin. It was designed to allow us to use a single codebase to support retailer localisations, style and branding customizations, and work across their desktop, mobile, and native platforms.

  • Takeover the Makeover (Development)
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czUYyMh0jwk

    While at Metail, I led the front-end development for a collaboration project with ITV's This Morning, where the standalone virtual fitting room we created was used on the live show every month in order to find a guest's outfit for a special occasion.

    The fitting room was used by one of the hosts on a touchscreen and viewers were invited to try to submit outfits for themselves as suggestions for the guest. At the peak, the fitting room supported over 5000 concurrent users.

    For this work, we were nominated for the 2014 BAFTA for Digital Creativity.

  • CrystalEye (Development)
    https://journals.iucr.org/j/issues/2012/02/00/he5533/

    CrystalEye was a tool I created while doing my Ph.D. to help me gather crystallographic data that had been published in peer-reviewed journals. It started as a web crawler that automatically scraped this data from the journal articles before republishing them in a single collection on its own website.

    Later, I further expanded the tool to convert the data to XML for easier processing, added RSS/Atom feeds to allow other researchers easy access to the data, and 3D visualizations and graphs.

Skills

  • Languages

    JavaScript, CSS, Less, Sass, Java, Clojure, PHP, HTML, XML, RDF, CoffeeScript

  • Libraries/APIs

    React, Node.js, Marionette.js, Backbone.js, Backbone.Marionette

  • Other

    UI, UX, Full-stack, Front-end Development, React Context API, React Query, ESLint, AWS CloudFront

  • Frameworks

    ClojureScript, Material-UI, Redux, JSON Web Tokens (JWT), Re-frame, Jasmine, Jest, Spring

  • Tools

    Amazon Cognito, Amazon CloudFront CDN, Mercurial, Git, IntelliJ IDEA, WebStorm, Grunt, Jenkins, Atom, Zeplin, Sentry, BrowserStack, Leiningen, Grunt.js, Jetty, Maven

  • Paradigms

    Functional Programming, Agile Software Development, Object-oriented Programming (OOP), REST, Kanban

  • Platforms

    Meteor, Heroku, WordPress, Galaxy, AWS Lambda, AWS EC2

  • Industry Expertise

    Web Development

  • Storage

    MongoDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, AWS S3, Elasticsearch

Education

  • Ph.D. in Chemical Informatics
    2004 - 2008
    University of Cambridge - England
  • Master's degree in Chemistry
    1999 - 2003
    University of Oxford - England

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