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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
    UI, Less, CSS, Material-UI, Cypress.io, React Testing Library...
  • Metail
    CSS, Material-UI, Git, React Testing Library, Amazon Cognito, AWS Amplify...
  • Inclusively
    CSS, Material-UI, Sentry, Git, Heroku, JSON Web Tokens (JWT), Node.js...

Experience

Location

Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom

Availability

Part-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 localizations.
    Technologies: UI, Less, CSS, Material-UI, Cypress.io, React Testing Library, Amazon CloudFront CDN, Stripe, React Query, Meteor, Node.js, React

  • Web Engineer

    2020 - 2020
    Metail
    • Was asked to take a jQuery-based, static MVP of an image workflow tool and to reimplement and extend the features as a fully responsive, single-page React site.
    • Developed the features that included user account lifecycle, user group management, and filtering and pagination of images through the various stages of their workflow.
    • Worked closely with a back-end developer who provided a REST API using AWS Amplify (with AWS Cognito for user identity).
    • Was required to define the layout and user flows through the app.
    Technologies: CSS, Material-UI, Git, React Testing Library, Amazon Cognito, AWS Amplify, Zustand, React Query, React, JavaScript

  • Web Engineer

    2020 - 2020
    Inclusively
    • Was required to take an existing WordPress site, which helped people with disabilities find suitable jobs, and to rewrite and expand on the features using the React ecosystem.
    • Worked closely with a back-end developer and designer to implement the landing site, account creation, profile management, job search, and job application features.
    • 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.
    • Was asked to mentor five Arizona State University students who worked on the project as part of their course.
    Technologies: CSS, Material-UI, Sentry, Git, Heroku, JSON Web Tokens (JWT), Node.js, React Query, React, JavaScript

  • Web Engineer

    2019 - 2019
    Social News Desk
    • Was the front-end specialist in a team of three, tasked with reimplementing and extending the SND on air product, which allows news stations to create and interact with social media feeds live on air.
    • Created a component structure and related styles that would allow straightforward reuse and extension for different branding.
    • Led the implementation of pixel-perfect styling and developed Sass mixins for the creation of smooth, reusable CSS animations.
    Technologies: CSS, Node.js, Git, AWS Lambda, MongoDB, Sass, Redux, React, JavaScript

  • Lead Web Engineer

    2015 - 2019
    Metail
    • I was the lead engineer for the development of Metails’s virtual fitting rooms, which covered the front-end and all related middle-tier REST APIs and components.
    • The primary product was a customisable, localisable plugin for clothing retailer’s desktop and mobile web sites, which allowed users to create a virtual representation of their body shape and to try on clothes and receive sizing recommendations.
    • The plugin was deployed across 4 continents to sites with tens of thousands of daily users and so we had to pay particular attention to payload size, scalability and robustness.
    • Worked closely with project managers and designers to outline technical feasibility of mockups and designs, provide time estimates and break up high-level requirements into workable tasks.
    • Planned technical evolution of projects in line with feature development, technical debt and customer adoption. We worked in a cross-functional, cross-site team using a Kanban board in Jira to manage the work streams.
    • Actively developed and mentored junior and senior engineers.
    Technologies: Java, Less, CSS, Material-UI, Git, AWS S3, Amazon CloudFront CDN, Clojure, ClojureScript, React

  • Web Tech Lead

    2013 - 2015
    Metail
    • Helped build, line managed and led the technical team for the development of Metail’s fitting room UIs. The team grew to 8 members at its largest.
    • 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.
    Technologies: Java, Less, CSS, Mercurial (Hg), Grunt.js, Jetty, Maven, Backbone.js, CoffeeScript

  • 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: Java, Less, WordPress, PHP, Maven, 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: Java, CSS, Atom, RDF, XML, Clojure, JavaScript, HTML

Experience

  • The Club HQ
    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
    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
    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
    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

  • Frameworks

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

  • Libraries/APIs

    React, AWS Amplify, Node.js, Marionette.js, Stripe, Backbone.js, Backbone.Marionette

  • Other

    React Context API, UI, UX, Full-stack, Front-end Development, React Query, Zustand, Web Development, ESLint, Mercurial (Hg), React Testing Library

  • Tools

    WebStorm, Amazon Cognito, Amazon CloudFront CDN, Mercurial, Git, IntelliJ IDEA, 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

  • Storage

    AWS S3, MongoDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, 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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