Jack McGregor

Senior Full Stack Developer

Senior fullstack NodeJS developer with a strong background in graphic design an UXUI. I've worn many hats, from software engineering instructor, sharing my knowledge with aspiring developers, fintech and contributing to one of Canada's leading ML search platforms, and across e-commerce, blockchain and marketing. For the past 3 years, I've been collaborating closely with various startups, helping transform their innovative ideas into reality. What I love most about my work is that every day brings new challenges and opportunities to create something meaningful. Willing to jump in the deep end with any tech / stack and deliver results. Big believer in giving back and paying forward.

Contact

• LinkedIn
• GitHub

Work Experience

Lead Software Engineer | Antler Digital (Remote)

December 2020 - Present

Antler Digital is a startup agency that builds and invests in bespoke digital products and services. The company is tiny (3-4 people) so I wear many hats, but my main focus has been front-end, testing and dev-ops.

Key Projects:

Wiserfunding

Wiserfunding is a fintech startup focusing on data analytics, insights and reporting to help investors make better decisions. I was essentially the only front-end developer on the project. Some of the clients involve Revolut, Izola Bank and BNF Bank. I've been working with them for over 2.5 years and my work has had a noticeable impact on customer experience.

• Developed complex data visualization for financial reports and portfolios
  • Building bespoke and extensively tested macroeconomic charts, interactive choropleth maps, Gantt-charts, packed bubble charts and interactive multi-bar sliding distribution charts, to name a few.
  • Business value: visually appeasing and ease of comparative analysis for the business and its clients when making financial investment decisions.
• Built powerful internal product "Wiserinsights" using Ag-Grid.
  • Building on Ag-Grid's Enterprise features, I provided valuable functionality allowing the user to perform complex actions like portfolio comparison, custom charting and flexible data exporting in a variety of formats (not just the ones provided by default). Additionally, I built an upload feature that allows users to validate and transform CSV and Excel sheets directly in the application via upload, drag & drop and copy-paste
  • Business value: massively streamlining the data entry barrier, providing seamless ways for the end-user to import, validate, analyse and export their data.
• Implemented extensive & comprehensive testing suites using Playwright and Jest
  • Sole developer building out multi-environment, multi-role Playwright testing suite, state- and role-focused integration tests with React Testing Library, and comprehensive unit-testing of the most crucial aspects of the platform with Jest
  • Additionally, I built a playwright ID selector tool used by the backend for their acceptance tests (easier and faster for Python developers unfamiliar with DOM traversal to write acceptance tests)
  • I got ~75% of the way through rewriting the tests for BunJS before business priorities changed. It was a great learning experience and the tests were approximately 6x faster than Jest.
  • Business value: Far greater confidence when releasing new features, caught countless bugs before they became an issue, and helped the backend to build their own regression tests faster and easier

React | NextJS | TailwindCSS | Jest | Playwright | Recharts | Victory | React Testing Library | Python | AgGrid

One Tribe

One Tribe was an eco-centric carbon capture and storage startup that was dedicated to reforestation and sustainability. While they managed to helped the planting of hundres of thousands of trees, they unfortunately wound down operations in late 2024. They are currently transitioning to the US.

• Custom BigCommerce application for client portal integration
  • BigCommerce is leader in global e-commerce. We designed, built and deployed a plugin to their store so their users could seamlessly integrate our payments system.
  • Business value: increased revenue from a successful 3rd party integration. A Shopify plugin was on the roadmap before they wound down.
• Full scale cutting-edge conversion of their platform
  • When we inherited the project, it was in a state of disarray. We kicked it into shape by moving from 7 UI libraries to 1 (TailwindCSS), several state management systems to 1 (Recoil), transitioned what pages we could to SSR and secured the app with AuthJS.
  • Business value: the platform went from being slow, ugly and filled with bugs to a blazing fast, cutting-edge, modern application in about 3 months
• Stripe integration, eventually handling over £100k per month
  • The business was losing money due to how the original developer had configured Paypal. We moved to Stripe, transitioning the existing customers once their current subscriptions were ending.
  • Business value: Increased revenue and clarity while experiencing no downtime for customers
• Testing suite
  • Sole developer to build out testing suite (BunJS for unit tests and Playwright for E2E), and integrating them into a CICD pipeline (initially CircleCI but transitioned to Github Actions). Financially sensitive code was written with TDD.
  • Business value: increased confidence when deploying new features. Much greater security when testing payment-sensitive features like the Events Calculator, both an integrated and stand-alone app that generated revenue by helping event coordinators calculate and offset their carbon footprint
• Key contributor to database migration from Firebase to Xata
  • The CTO wanted to migrate from the unstructured Firebase to a flavour of SQL, eventually going with XataDB.
  • The process was completed with a incredible customer downtime of just 1 day given the scope of the project, no revenue loss and only a couple of minor UI bugs that were remedied and tested against immediately.
  • Business value: a cleaner, faster, and more manageable platform, that tied directly in to the Admin Panel
• Admin Panel
  • Key contributor to the company's Admin Panel, a bespoke NextJS app with XataDB integration for the company to easily view and interact with their client's accounts
  • Business value: Before, only people with in-depth knowledge of Stripe could manually update client's subscriptions and payment methods. With the Admin Panel, this allowed anyone with sufficient permissions to do this, reducing bottlenecks.

React | NextJS | TailwindCSS | BunJS | Jest | Stripe | Firebase | Xata | CircleCI | Github Actions | Recoil

Other Projects

Sports Icon

Sports Icon is an online NFT marketplace specialising in iconic moments in sporting history. Their USP was trying to turn such moments into collectables. The application was built using NextJS, TailwindCSS and the Dapper blockchain for authentication, trading and interacting with other members

React | NextJS | TailwindCSS | Dapper

deZaan

deZaan (part of ofi) is a global leader in the sourcing, manufacturing, sale and more of chocolate. Their website, built in GatsbyJS, hosts hundreds of pages and is translated into several languages and regions.

Several notable achievements include reducing build time from 12 minutes to 4, and refactoring their codebase to adhere to DRY practice

React | Gatsby | Contentful | TailwindCSS

Frontend Developer | Coveo Solutions Inc (Montreal)

March 2020 - December 2021

Coveo Solutions Inc is a global leader in AI-powered search solutions based in Quebec, Canada

Key Projects:

Admin Panel

The focal point of Coveo's platform, the Admin Panel was a multi-team effort spanning ML, Analytics, Data Processing, Visualisation, E-commerce, Plugins and more. Built in a unique blend of SkeletonJS, React and Turbo, it supported tens of thousands of users across hundreds of clients. The app was my first time working with monorepos (Turbo) and it was such a great learning experience that, on my recommendation, at One Tribe we were in the process of reorganising the microservice archticture into a monorepo before they wound down.

Some notable features I helped build and test include a URL-based multi-modal, multi-step form system for onboarding users to certain features and an end-to-end regression testing suite using Cypress

• Business impact: Streamlining the user-onboarding experience helped to bring more clients into the fold while the regression testing ensured that those users were less likely to encounter bugs.

React | SkeletonJS | Jest | Ruby | Redux | Turbo

Vapor

Contributed to their in-house UI library (Vapor). We were a team of three who built the library from the ground up using minimal dependencies and a component-based approach. CICD was setup with CircleCI and SonarQube and every component was tested thoroughly with unit and integration tests.

• Business impact: Designing & building out an internal UI library enforced brand recognition and consitency across the growing company.

React | CircleCI | SonarQube

Fullstack Junior Software Engineer | Cardano Group (London)

December 2019 - January 2019

Cardano Group is a growing force in the fintech space, providing solutions for pensions, fiduciary management and more. Not to be confused with Cardano the blockchain.

Key Projects:

Trellis

Trellis was the internal software flagship at Cardano. It pulled in vast amounts of data from the company's data lake and used a variety of practices, packages and technologies to create a powerful and insightful tool the fund managers would use to craft their portfolios. Built primarily with React, SCSS, Redux, Observales, SQL and Express.

• Business impact: Designing & building out an internal UI library enforced brand recognition and consitency across the growing company.

React | SCSS | Docker | Redux | Express | SQL | Jest | Cypress

Software Engineering Instructor | Sparta Global (London)

October 2017 - January 2019

Sparta Global is a London-based software and business academy that operates on a part-bootcamp, part-consultancy model. I was an instructor in the software-bootcamp sector, meaning I would run 3-month intensive training courses to young adults with zero prior knowledge of coding, from core concepts like HTML, CSS and JS fundamentals, to building fullstack applications with Ruby-on-Rails and SQL.

Key Projects:

Circle of Intrapreneurs

The Circle of Intrapreneurs is a global grassroots movement that aims to 'turn the ship' of big industries from within with inovation. I lead the final project development, from design to delivery, of a proof-of-concept social media app for the company.

Abbey Road

Lead the development of a final project for regression testing suite for the famous Abbey Road Studios' external recording platform.

Course update

Technology changes constantly. As such, I regularly took the initiative to study and update the course materials, including talking points, exercises, code-alongs and projects.

• Business impact: Educating new minds in hard- and soft-skills while keeping materials current and deepening my own knowedge.

Ruby on Rails | HTML | CSS | SQL | Selenium | Cucumber

Front-end Developer | WCRS (Apple, London)

June 2017 - October 2017

WCRS is a digital development and marketing agency in London. The team I worked in was an exclusive Apple-contracted (mandatory NDA) team which worked solely on the current Apple cycle's marketing material. The work required working on-site at Apple HQ in Silicon Valley in the run-up to their 2017 launch.

Key Projects:

2017 Launch

Pixel-perfect HTML and CSS changes across dozens of Apple's european locales, and the occasional JS fix.

• Business impact: Ensuring every single released page was held to Apple's impeccable standards: for them, perfection starts with the user's first interaction with the company.

HTML | CSS

Technical Skills

This section might seems like a shameless SEO keyword grab but I promise I've either built apps or tested apps with each of them. I love seeing first hand how different groups do things differently. I try to keep up to date and practiced with the latest technologies and best practices, but some are more refined than others. The following list isn't conclusive, but it's a good indication of what I've worked with. I spend a lot of my time experimenting with new technologies, building weird and wonderful games, apps and services.

Languages

JavaScript / TypeScript | BunJS | Deno | Ruby | Python | Dart | Solidity | Go | HTML / CSS / SASS

Testing

Jest | Cypress | Jasmine | Mocha | Playwright | React Testing Library | Selenium | Cucumber | rTest | Chai | Enzyme

Frameworks

React | React Native | NextJS | ExpressJS | NestJS | Flask | Django | Ruby on Rails | Flutter

DevOps

Docker | CircleCI | SonarQube | GitHub Actions | GraphQL

Databases

Postgres | Supabase | Xata | MongoDB | Firebase | MySQL | SqlLite

Community Involvement

Mentoring & Teaching

CodeFirstGirls: Mentor and Course Writer (2018-2019)

My favourite extra-curricular activity and one I sorely miss. CFG is a UK-based project to get more women in tech by offering free, 4- and 6-month courses in web development fundamentals. I taught around four of these courses and was contracted to build the next generation of their courses. The best part of the job was generating interest and excitement in software and seeing some students go on to actually find roles in tech.

Codebar: Student and Mentor (2017-2019)

CodeBar is a Europe-wide monthly meetup that pairs experts with novices taking their first steps in the world of software. I went from being the one looking for help to the one helping.

Coveo Blitz: Hackathon Mentor (2018-2019)

The annual Coveo Blitz is a hackathon competition run by Coveo Solutions that encourages innovation, competion and teamwork in solving challenges designed by the Coveo team (us).

Colour In Tech: Workshop Presenter (2018)

Ran a 2-hour code workshop for around 100 teenagers, introducing some fun concepts to boost entusiasm in tech

Other Projects

Circle of Intrapreneurs: Ongoing software engineering support

Originally born out of the Spart Global final project, the app was rewritten with Node and React to provide a better user experience.

Folk Photography: Website development

A small, customer facing photography website for a UK-based company, built with Gatsby, Netlify and CSS-in-JS

MDD Solutions

A stylishly simple information site for UK-based recruitment company MDD Solutions built in PayloadCMS, NextJS and TailwindCSS

NOTE: There have been many more projects over the years, many of which have since gone to the Great Repository in the Sky

Certifications / Education

General Assembly (London)

March 2017 - June 2017

• 12 week intensive coding bootcamp
• Focused on Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, React, Node, SQL, Git and more

University of Leeds

September 2008 - June 2011

• BA (Hons) Geography