Natalie Akam

https://github.com/natstar93

I am a front end developer with leadership skills and over 7 years' experience developing and delivering projects for high-traffic websites. I love shipping new features to users and improving the health of the codebase by addressing technical debt and making informed decisions on new technologies and libraries. I have been heavily involved in all aspects of the agile development lifecycle from initial product conversations to deployment and monitoring.

I have recently been working on personal projects using Solidity, Ethers, Vite and NextJS.

I am seeking a role that focuses on delivering and maintaining high-quality software projects, rather than a position focused on team management.

Core Skills

• Web development with React, Redux, Node, Typescript, CSS, CSS in JS, Webpack
• Writing meaningful unit, integration and E2E tests using libraries such as Jest, React Testing Library, Enzyme, Mocha, Chai, Webdriverio and Puppeteer
• Understanding application health and key metrics by implementing Kibana logging, monitoring and dashboards in New Relic One
• AWS pipeline creation and maintenance and autoscaling setup
• Strong mentoring and leadership skills, able to build trust with colleagues across the business
• Pair programming and agile project development
• Problem solving mentality and positive attitude

Experience

Trainline (December 2015 - March 2023)

Senior Web Engineer (Apr 2020 – March 2023)

• Taking the lead on multiple deliverables requiring collaboration within the team and with other teams
• Researching and implementing new libraries and new tech (React hooks, React Testing Library)
• Running front end learning sessions and pairing on TDD with more junior team members
• Making improvements to tech stack and identifying improvements to testing

Achievements

• Successfully led two teams in implementing white labeling across four front-end applications, addressing configuration challenges in heavily customized projects
• Lead developer of a delay compensation project and a redesign of the site's bookings view, both of which received highly positive feedback and were completed in time for the site migration
• Helped an API focussed team design new endpoints suitable for our use cases and rewrote parts of the integration test suite to mock the new responses. Rolled out the migration successfully
• Refactored a live application to Typescript, introduced widespread use of Context and implemented AWS autoscaling

Interim Engineering Team Lead (May 2020 – Sep 2020)

• Managing a full stack team of 8 developers remotely
• Working with the Product Owner to plan development work, ensure prioritisation of tech debt and set achievable goals for the team

Achievements

• Supervised my team's support for the migration of the French site. We were responsible for migration of user accounts upon login
• Planned and managed an urgent project as part of a cross-team intiative to allow users to amend reservations, in response to new restrictions on some rail services
• Provided empathetic support to team members by actively listening and addressing their concerns and challenges

Developer (Oct 2017 – Mar 2020)

• Building greenfield React applications and contributing to a new stateful login & customer migration form
• Fetching data from external APIs using Node and exposing endpoints to the client side
• Delivering features end to end, from planning and estimating through to production deployment
• Helping organise meetups at Trainline and coaching at Code First Girls and Codebar

Achievements

• Won an award as part of a cross-team cluster that delivered the eticketing project
• Launched a new and fully tested application with auth, logging and monitoring
• Helped organise and presented at the annual Trainline Tech Summit

Associate Developer (Jun 2016 – Sep 2017)

• Feature development with React, Node and CSS

Achievements

• Implemented Sitespect and delivered the first A/B feature tests allowing the team to run and measure UI experiements

Agile QA Developer (Dec 2015 – May 2016)

• Writing automated acceptance tests using Webdriverio, Node, Mocha & Chai and configuring them to run in BrowserStack and upon TeamCity deployments
• Improving unit test code coverage for existing applications

Achievements

• I delivered an E2E testing framework with support from a senior developer

Makers Academy (September 2015 - November 2015)

Alumni Helper

• Conducting code reviews and teaching juniors to debug issues

Education

Makers Academy (June 2015 - August 2015)

A highly selective 12 week software development bootcamp

• Pair programming
• TDD, BDD using testing frameworks Rspec, Capybara, Jasmine, Karma & Protractor
• OOP and software design using SOLID principles
• Agile, MVP development using Kanban
• Final project involved self-teaching and developing with Ionic & Cordova

Nottingham Trent University (2006 - 2007)

MSc Real-Time Computing Applications

University of Nottingham (2003 - 2006)

BSc Chemistry

Short Courses

C# Training Course (February 2017)
Training Dragon

Introduction to SQL (February 2015)
Lumia Development

Digital Analytics Fundamentals (August 2014)
Google

CSS for Web Design (May 2014)
Media Training

Other Work Experience

Aimia (June 2010 - May 2015)
Senior eCommunications Executive
eCommunications Executive

Totaljobs Group (November 2007 - June 2010)
Production Assistant