Nicholas Westby: Polymath Programmer

I stand behind my work.

Applied Skill Set

An overview of skills I’ve applied throughout 20+ years of software engineering:

Full Stack Web Development

• Built dozens of websites from scratch spanning healthcare, manufacturing, e-commerce, gaming, real estate, nonprofit, and people-centric data industries.
• Worked across the full stack from frontend UI through backend APIs, databases, CMS architecture, and deployment infrastructure.

Frontend

• Built responsive, accessible interfaces using TypeScript, Angular, Vue, AngularJS, and vanilla JavaScript.
• Styled with Tailwind, Bootstrap, Sass, Less, and modern CSS.
• Implemented SPAs, parallax scrolling, custom animations, interactive Google Maps integrations, and complex search UIs.

Backend & APIs

• Extensive experience with C#, ASP.NET MVC, Kotlin, Python, and Node.js.
• Designed caching strategies (output caching, donut caching, self-invalidating caches) for sub-50ms server response times.
• Integrated third-party APIs (Shopatron, Google Maps, Salesforce, Cloudflare, etc.) and built custom web services and data pipelines.
• Built a sitemap generation pipeline for approximately 100 million pages using Databricks and Cloudflare R2.
• Built an encryption/decryption prototype in JavaScript and C# to convince a third party to support this scenario for improved PCI compliance.

CMS & Content Architecture

• Deep expertise in the Umbraco CMS. Architected multi-tenant, multi-regional, multilingual platforms with composable widget systems and fine-grained permissions.
• Built a statically generated site using Contentful as a headless CMS with Gatsby and GraphQL.
• Designed content editing workflows used by hundreds of non-technical editors across multiple organizations.
• Created Formulate, an open source Umbraco form builder that allows forms to be designed with no technical knowledge.

DevOps & Infrastructure

• Deployed and managed applications across Docker, Kubernetes, Azure, AWS, IIS, and Cloudflare (Workers, R2, WAF).
• Configured HTTPS, reverse proxies, CI/CD pipelines (TeamCity, Jenkins, Azure DevOps), and Terraform-managed Cloudflare infrastructure.
• On-call rotation experience with PagerDuty, Prometheus, Grafana, and Sumo Logic.

Open Source & Community

• Created and maintained multiple open source projects, including Formulate and 10+ C# libraries.
• Contributed accepted pull requests to the Umbraco core and popular community packages.
• Published articles, instructional videos, and appeared on podcasts about software development.

Other

• I typically use WebStorm, Rider, and IntelliJ for development.
• Don’t tell anyone, but I actually like working with regular expressions (ask me about the time I built a regex tool to help explore an absurd code base with nearly 500K lines of SQL code).

Websites I Built

I have worked on many websites, but these are some of the ones I had a leading role in building from scratch.

Whitepages, 411.com & PeopleSearch

Senior software engineer on high traffic people search and property intelligence platforms.

Sunrise Growers

Lead full stack developer of this fully responsive food provider's website.

Allsup

Lead developer of Allsup's family of websites and the Clarity Design System.

Accuride

Lead developer of this manufacturing website, with primary effort on the backend implementation.

National Research Group

Lead developer of this market research firm's website, built with Gatsby, Contentful, and GraphQL.

OneOC

Sole full stack developer of this volunteer enabling website.

Celestron

Lead backend developer of this e-commerce website for a leading telescope manufacturer.

SmartStop Self Storage

Lead developer of this self-storage website, with a focus on CRM integration and backend business logic.

US Storage Centers

Lead developer of this self-storage website, with a major emphasis on page speed optimization.

FirstHealth

Lead backend developer of this healthcare website.

Irvine Offices

Lead full stack developer of this reusable single-page microsite.

Irvine Spectrum Center

Lead developer of this website for a popular Southern California shopping and entertainment destination.

BrandingBusiness

Sole full stack developer of this agency website.

Ceris

Lead backend developer of this single page application (SPA) website for a healthcare accounting company.

Jacuzzi & Sundance Spas

Lead developer of Jacuzzi.com and SundanceSpas.com.

AllCare Health

Lead developer of this healthcare website, with primary focus on the backend implementation.

IGT

Primary developer of IGT.com and MegaJackpots.com. Moved both into the Umbraco CMS with internationalization support.