Nick Day
UI, UX, and Front-End Developer
Location
Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom
Toptal Member Since
September 20, 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.
Nick is available for hire
Hire NickPortfolio
The Club HQ
User Interface (UI), Less, CSS, MUI (Material UI), Cypress...
RadiLens
JavaScript, TypeScript, Next.js, Prisma, Tailwind CSS, Azure, Figma
Endeavor
JavaScript, TypeScript, CSS, Git, GitHub, Jira, Figma, Zeplin, Datadog, Cypress...
Experience
CSS - 15 yearsJavaScript - 15 yearsMUI (Material UI) - 5 yearsReact - 4 yearsReact Query - 3 yearsTypeScript - 2 yearsTailwind CSS - 2 yearsPrisma - 1 yearLocation
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.
Work Experience
2017 - PRESENT
Co-founder
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: User Interface (UI), Less, CSS, MUI (Material UI), Cypress, React Testing Library, Amazon CloudFront CDN, Stripe, React Query, Meteor, Node.js, React
2021 - 2022
Web Engineer
RadiLens
- Built the front and back end of an MVP to help radiologists book follow-up appointments with patients.
- Helped the company decide on a tech stack of Next.js, Tailwind, and Prisma and developed the app from scratch from a set of pre-existing Figma designs.
- Worked closely with the CEO and CTO to outline the features required for the MVP and then define the lowest risk strategy for developing the app in the required timeframe.
Technologies: JavaScript, TypeScript, Next.js, Prisma, Tailwind CSS, Azure, Figma
2020 - 2021
Web Engineer
Endeavor
- Developed OpenStage, a site that allows users to book "exceptional talent" to take part in their virtual events.
- Worked on all aspects of the front end, including pixel-perfect responsive views, auth, analytics, error-tracking, emails, performance, and unit and integration testing.
- Communicated with project managers and designers to outline technical feasibility of mockups and designs, providing time estimates and breaking up high-level requirements into workable tasks.
Technologies: JavaScript, TypeScript, CSS, Git, GitHub, Jira, Figma, Zeplin, Datadog, Cypress, Amazon Cognito, Segment.io, Autopilot, Next.js
2020 - 2020
Web Engineer
Metail
- Reimplemented a jQuery-based, static MVP of an image workflow tool and extended 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 Amazon Cognito for user identity).
- Defined the layout and user flow through the app.
Technologies: CSS, MUI (Material UI), Git, React Testing Library, Amazon Cognito, AWS Amplify, Zustand, React Query, React, JavaScript
2020 - 2020
Web Engineer
Inclusively
- Rewrote an existing WordPress site, which helped people with disabilities find suitable jobs, and expanded on the React ecosystem features.
- 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 provide time estimates to meet the broad requirements for the project.
- Mentored five Arizona State University students who worked on the project as part of their course.
Technologies: CSS, MUI (Material UI), Sentry, Git, Heroku, JSON Web Tokens (JWT), Node.js, React Query, React, JavaScript
2019 - 2019
Web Engineer
Social News Desk
- Reimplemented and extended the SND On Air product, which allows news stations to create and interact with social media feeds live on air, as a front-end specialist in a team of three.
- 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 to create smooth, reusable CSS animations.
Technologies: CSS, Node.js, Git, AWS Lambda, MongoDB, Sass, Redux, React, JavaScript
2015 - 2019
Lead Web Engineer
Metail
- Developed Metails’s virtual fitting rooms, which covered the front-end and all related middle-tier REST APIs and components, as the lead engineer.
- Produced the primary product: a customizable, localizable plugin for clothing retailers’ desktop and mobile websites, allowing users to create a virtual representation of their body shape as they try on clothes and receive sizing recommendations.
- Deployed the plugin across four continents to sites with tens of thousands of daily users, paying particular attention to payload size, scalability, and robustness.
- Worked closely with project managers and designers to outline technical feasibility of mockups and designs, providing time estimates and breaking 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 workstreams.
- Actively developed and mentored junior and senior engineers.
Technologies: Java, Less, CSS, MUI (Material UI), Git, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Amazon CloudFront CDN, Clojure, ClojureScript, React, Selenium, BrowserStack
2013 - 2015
Web Tech Lead
Metail
- Helped build, line managed, and led the technical team to develop Metail’s fitting-room UIs. The team grew to eight members at its largest.
- Defined the architecture for and led the development of an iframe-based, customizable, localizable virtual fitting-room plugin for retailers' desktop sites.
- Led the development for standalone fitting-room sites, such as our collaboration with ITV’s This Morning, where it was used periodically on live television. We were nominated for the BAFTA for Digital Creativity in 2014.
Technologies: Java, Less, CSS, Mercurial, Grunt, Jetty, Apache Maven, Backbone.js, CoffeeScript
2010 - 2013
Developer | Products
Metail
- Led the re-implementation and expansion of Metail’s 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, Apache Maven, Backbone.js, JavaScript
2004 - 2010
Ph.D. Candidate and Postdoctoral Research Assistant
University of Cambridge
- Developed an open-source software to aid the 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, Data Visualization, Analysis
Experience
Talent Booking for Virtual Events
A React-based site allows you to book well-known talent for your virtual events. I worked on all aspects of the front tend, including pixel-perfect responsive views, auth, analytics, error-tracking, emails, performance, and unit and integration testing.
The Club HQ
https://www.theclubhq.comI'm a co-founder and sole developer of The Club HQ, which aims to support grassroots sports clubs by providing a cheap, easy way 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 to see what clothes looked like on their body and receive recommendations on which size to buy.
I defined the architecture and led this plugin's front and middle-tier development. It was designed to use a single codebase to support retailer localizations, style, and branding customizations and work across their desktop, mobile, and native platforms.
I defined the architecture and led this plugin's front and middle-tier development. It was designed to use a single codebase to support retailer localizations, style, and branding customizations and work across their desktop, mobile, and native platforms.
Takeover the Makeover
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czUYyMh0jwkWhile at Metail, I led the front-end development for a collaboration project with ITV's This Morning. The standalone virtual fitting room we created was used on the live show every month to find a guest's outfit for a special occasion.
One of the hosts used the fitting room 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 5,000 concurrent users.
We were nominated for the 2014 BAFTA for Digital Creativity for this work.
One of the hosts used the fitting room 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 5,000 concurrent users.
We were nominated for the 2014 BAFTA for Digital Creativity for this work.
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 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 website.
Later, I 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.
Later, I 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, TypeScript, PHP, HTML, XML, RDF, CoffeeScript
Frameworks
MUI (Material UI), ClojureScript, Redux, Tailwind CSS, JSON Web Tokens (JWT), Cypress, Re-frame, Jest, Spring, Next.js, Selenium
Libraries/APIs
Context API, React, AWS Amplify, Node.js, Marionette.js, Stripe, Backbone.js, Backbone.Marionette, Segment.io
Other
User Interface (UI), User Experience (UX), Full-stack, Front-end Development, React Query, Zustand, Web Development, ESLint, React Testing Library, Autopilot, RSS Feeds, Data Visualization, Web Crawlers, SDKs, Analysis
Tools
WebStorm, Amazon Cognito, Amazon CloudFront CDN, Mercurial, Git, Prisma, IntelliJ IDEA, Grunt, Jenkins, Atom, Zeplin, Sentry, BrowserStack, Leiningen, Jetty, Apache Maven, GitHub, Jira, Figma, Uploadcare
Paradigms
Functional Programming, Agile Software Development, Object-oriented Programming (OOP), REST, Kanban, Testing
Platforms
Meteor, Heroku, WordPress, Galaxy, AWS Lambda, Amazon EC2, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure
Storage
Amazon S3 (AWS S3), MongoDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, Datadog
Education
2004 - 2008
Ph.D. in Chemical Informatics
University of Cambridge - England
1999 - 2003
Master's Degree in Chemistry
University of Oxford - England