Hi, I'm Nik!
I'm a front-end developer and hardware engineer with a passion for all things tech! I love the challenge of solving complex problems and enjoy understanding the low level details of how the technology actually works. My goal is to lead teams in building scalable, reliable, and performant systems. I also have a strong passion for accessibility, and believe it is paramount to build inclusive and usable technology for all.
In my free time, you can find me rock climbing, hanging with my chihuahuas, proselytizing about bidets, or annoying my family with my latest silly home automation.
Experience
Frontend Software Engineer – L5
Amazon - shopbop.com | Fort Collins, CO (Remote) | April 2022 - Present
I owned implementation and maintenance for projects including Global Navigation Accessibility Overhaul & React Migration, Design System Development/Documentation, React 18 migration, Homepage Editorial Components, Search, GDPR, Legalese Pages, and Footer. I also drove accessibility and Core Web Vitals (web performance) initiatives and introduced improvements to partner workflows that increased delivery speed of editorial content by 30%. I championed frontend excellence and openness across the organization through pairing/mentorship, empathetic code reviews, and workshops/presentations.
Featured Projects
Global Navigation Modernization Initiative
Migrated our legacy JSP global navigation to React while improving the animations, optimizing performance, fixing existing bugs, and making the menu fully responsive.
Shopbop Latency Improvements
Reduced real and perceived latency by correcting our srcset/image optimization implementations, adding webp support, enhancing server-side rendering, and adding workflow scripts that helped content schedulers set aspect ratios to prevent layout shifts.
Accessibility Enhancements
Made our top navigation, editorial components, search, and menu slide outs fully WCAG compliant by adding ARIA attributes, keyboard navigation, skip links, and proper focus behavior. Also, I developed and presented an internal accessibility workshop with methods and learnings from this project.
React 18 Upgrade
Designed strategy and executed a React 16 -> React 18 upgrade across all of our Micro-frontend repos (~40) with no down time. Migrated some enzyme tests to React Testing Library while introducing testing shims for enzyme tests that could not be migrated within our timeline. Updated dependencies and repo-local development environments.
Automated Translations And Legalese
Designed and executed a project that moved Shopbop away from manually translating content that cost us $96K a year. Moved our translations to internal machine translations and moved critical Legalese content out of our CMS and onboarded it into Amazon's Legal document service. This allowed us to standardize styling and layout across these pages, thus removing developer effort to style these pages.
Intermediate Frontend Software Engineer
Microfocus | Fort Collins, CO | July 2021 - April 2022
I worked on a team migrated our legacy desktop application to a SaaS dashboard written using Angular and SCSS. I was responsible for new UI features, bug fixes, code reviews, and L10n across our whole application.
Featured Projects
Monitoring Control Center (MCC) Dashboard
Implemented features on a new Angular SaaS dashboard that replaced a legacy desktop application for server monitoring and alerting.
System Engineer / Lead Hardware Engineer
Hewlett-Packard Enterprise | Fort Collins, CO | Feb 2011 - July 2021
I was a lead hardware engineer and system architect on Synergy and C-Class Graphics Sidecars. I lead a team responsible for design and qualification for these projects as well as led efforts with ODM/JDM partners to our define architecture, design, and layout. Prior to that work, I owned the PCB design, layout, and phase 2 qualification for for the FPGA and manageability hardware on SuperdomeX, a x86 mission-critical bladed server.
Featured Projects
HPE Synergy 480 GPU Sidecars
Led architecture, design, and development of PCIe Gen4 sidecar motherboards developed for high density GPU deployments in bladed servers. This involved multiple PCBs with large power envelopes as well as PCIe retimers, PCIe Switches, and complex mechanical/thermal solutions.
HPE WS460c GPU Sidecars
Inherited a PCIe Gen3 Sidecar design with ongoing signal integrity problems and customer escalations. Debugged PCIe impedance issues with flex cables and developed a remote PCIe FW updater ISO for customers to deploy. Designed and developed the next generation side cars and eliminated troublesome design aspects.
HPE SuperdomeX
Worked on management hardware (FPGA & Microcontroller) PCB design of the first x86 version of the Superdome Mission-Critical Blade Server (after moving away from Itanium). Shipped a successful product working with a cross-functional team of pcb engineers, custom asic designers, signal integrity engineers, layout designers, and mechanical engineers.
Education
B.S., Computer and Electrical Engineering
August 2007 - December 2010
University of Texas at Austin
Work Status: US Citizen