Nicholas Olsen

Creative
Developer

Front-end
Architect

St. Thomas, Ontario

MAKE THINGS

nicholas.olsen101@gmail.com GitHub

Architecting art

Making things is part of who I am, and every medium has its own rules to learn. Those constraints aren’t barriers to creativity; they’re the structure that gives it direction, whether that is architecting a front-end system, designing a layout, or painting a picture. The rewarding part is knowing when to use the rules, when to bend them, and how to turn what works into systems, tools, and experiences that can grow.

Open to senior front-end, design engineering and front-end architecture roles, remote across Canada or in the London-Toronto corridor.

Nicholas at the workbench, painting a miniature.

Toolkit

Build

  • React
  • JavaScript
  • Node.js
  • Angular / Ionic
  • CSS & design tokens
  • REST APIs
  • Git

Design

  • Figma
  • Photoshop, Illustrator & XD
  • High-fidelity prototyping
  • Brand and print

Alongside

  • Blender and 3D
  • 3D printing
  • Video editing
  • Agile delivery
  • AI-assisted workflows

Credentials

Advanced Diploma

Confederation College, Thunder Bay, 2012-2015.

Award of Excellence

Highest grade in field of study, 2015.

PMC Level I, Pragmatic Institute

Product management certification, 2022. Passed the examination with a score of 100%.

Experience

  1. Sept 2023 - present, London, ON

    Lead Front-end Architect Lawlabs Inc.

    Own front-end architecture. Drive the integration of design and development process, set and enforce UX standards, and build the component libraries that carry them across teams.

  2. Aug 2019 - Sept 2023, London, ON

    Senior Front-end Developer Plaid Creations

    Four years on a small product team. The multi-tenant generator, its CMS and the commerce front end under Selected work all come from here.

  3. Jan 2019 - Aug 2019, London, ON

    Front-end Developer Vehikl

    Built a custom React component library, and developed and deployed a cross-platform mobile application in Ionic and Angular.

  4. 2017, Winnipeg, MB

    Lead Front-end Developer Funding Change

    Planned, built and deployed new React features, and redesigned the client-facing interface.

  5. 2015 - 2016, Winnipeg, MB

    Designer / Web Developer Vantage Studios

    Consulted with clients, designed brands, digital and print work, built WordPress sites and applications, and maintained the servers they ran on.

I like building tools that help people do their work, and I like making those tools feel good to use. Most of the last decade has gone into that, lately at Lawlabs. Fast, predictable, out of the way. Get that right and the tool disappears and the work is all that is left.

Selected work

A multi-tenant website generator, and the CMS behind it

One React codebase that generated, themed and published dozens of distinct client sites.

Plaid Creations 2019 - 2023 React, Firebase

Component libraries a team actually adopts

Built and maintained component libraries at three companies. At Lawlabs I also set the UX standards they encode.

Lawlabs, Plaid Creations, Vehikl 2019 - present Design systems

A commerce front end where the hard part came after checkout

Custom storefront including subscription purchase, billing and plan management.

Plaid Creations React

Making

  • Software & design

    Web applications & tools
    Systems that generate more than you put into them: component libraries, interfaces, and small tools built because the existing one annoyed me. The material happens to be code.
    Graphic design
    Brand work, print, and layout problems that only look simple once they are solved. Where I started, and still the fastest way I have of thinking an idea through.

  • Fine art

    Sketching
    Pencil and ink. The cheapest possible way to find out whether an idea is any good.
    Acrylic painting
    Fast, opaque and forgiving. Good for colour decisions that have to be made while the paint is still wet.
    Oil painting
    Slow, unforgiving of impatience, and the only place I work with no undo at all. Every decision stays where you put it.

  • 3D & print

    3D modelling
    Blender. Hard-surface work and props, usually headed for a printer or a game engine.
    3D printing
    Where a model stops being a file and starts being an object you can drop. Terrain, parts, and replacements for things that broke.

  • Tabletop

    Miniatures & sets
    Painting miniatures and building the terrain they get played on. Detail at a scale where most of the work is only visible to the person who did it.
    Dungeons & Dragons
    Running games: building a world with rules, then handing it to five people who will immediately test every edge of it. The closest thing to shipping software that involves no software.
    Lego
    Collecting and building. A parts library with fifty years of backwards compatibility, the best argument I know that constraints make you more inventive, not less.

  • Handmade

    Pottery
    Throwing, trimming, glazing, and accepting the kiln's opinion. Nothing else I do punishes a rushed beginning so precisely, or so early.
    Crochet
    Yarn as a construction material. Counted rows and repeating patterns, a system you execute one stitch at a time.

  • Outdoors

    Fishing & fly fishing
    Tying flies, reading water, and long stretches of not looking at a screen.