Personal profile 👋
Frontend development is my true calling.
I always enjoyed tackling challenging problems or cracking complex puzzles, and coding enabled me to turn those passions into skills. With a background in growth marketing, I quickly developed a strong enthusiasm for the overlap bewteen coding and user interaction. Being able to directly impact how people engage with a product by building solutions that maximize conversions and ROI is incredibly fulfilling, and Frontend development felt like the perfect fit from the start.
I'm passionate about transforming mockups into engaging experiences using different flavours of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, with a focus on modern frameworks. During my time as Tech Lead, I have sharpened my focus on code quality and mentoring, prioritizing collaboration and promoting continuous innovation.
Experience has taught me that being a good developer goes way beyond simply writing good code. Clear communication is key, and it often goes hand-in-hand with collaboration, flexibility, and stakeholder management, all skills that I can bring to the table. I value empathy, inclusion and open mindedness, and I strive for excellence also and especially through feedback (big fan here!).
Work Experience 👩💻
Frontend Developer
Futurewhiz (Squla), Amsterdam
07/2024 - present
Squla is the largest e-learning platform for kids in The Netherlands, offering a wide range of interactive educational content across various subjects, available both on desktop and as mobile app.
Responsibilities:
-
Developing and maintaining scalable frontend solutions within a
microservices architecture, ensuring seamless integration with backend
while optimizing performance, user experience, and scalability.
- Technologies used: Vue JS v2 and v3 (incl. Composition API), SCSS. -
Converting legacy app components from Backbone.js to Vue 3 with Composition API,
in order to improve maintainability and enhance the overall user interface.
- Technologies used: Vue JS, SCSS, Backbone.js - Extending and maintaining our in-house built WordPress themes (PHP), as part of a company-wide rebranding project, ensuring alignment with new and backward-compatible designs, functionality standards and marketing goals.
- Driving innovation by collaborating with cross-functional teams to deliver impactful features, as part of the Growth team, which focuses on driving company-wide change.
Frontend Developer
Futurewhiz (StudyGo), Amsterdam
09/2023 - 07/2024
StudyGo is a widely used e-learning platform among highschoolers in The Netherlands, available both on desktop and as mobile app.
Responsibilities:
-
Leading the frontend development of features for the Pro Package,
including Tutoring and Live Lessons, as part of a wider agile engineering team.
- Technologies used: React, Redux & Redux-Saga, SCSS, Cypress E2E. - Building and maintaining both the user-facing product and the admin app.
- Responsible for frontend deployments of desktop and mobile apps.
- Collaborating closely with product owners, backend developers and designers to ensure the delivery of high-quality, scalable code and APIs.
Frontend Tech Lead
TNW - A Financial Times Company, Amsterdam
11/2022 - 08/2023
The Next Web is a technology news website plus one of Europe's leading tech festivals focussing on new technologies and start-ups.
Responsibilities:
- Ensuring code quality and collaboration by conducting code reviews, promoting best coding practices and consistent standards, and fostering mentorship and knowledge sharing.
- Collaborating with the Backend Lead and Head of Product to assess technical feasibility, propose new features and solutions, and provide technical insights to shape the roadmap.
- Continuous researching of the latest trends and technologies to drive on future modernization efforts, aligning them with business goals and prioritizing developer experience to foster continuous improvements.
Frontend Engineer
TNW - A Financial Times Company, Amsterdam
03/2022 - 08/2023
Responsibilities:
-
Working on the main CMS for both the media site (with
millions of monthly users) and the marketing pages of
thenextweb.com,
including subdomains.
Together with the rest of the engineering team (about 10 people), I worked closely with our Head or Product and the Backend Lead to consistently deliver high quality, well structured and scalable solutions in line with the business's goals and needs. My day-to-day tasks spanned across multiple projects and applications, and included building new features, optimizing the existing codebase and UI, fixing bugs and solving technically challenging issues. Tasks also include integration and maintainance of 3rd party tools such as Hubspot and Wordpress.
- Technologies used: React, Craft CMS, Twig, Tailwind CSS. -
Actively contributing to the development of the major company's product EarlyBird,
the event managment platform for TNW events.
Earlybird is TNW's internal tool for ticketing, event organisation and more.
It's made of a CMS and a user-facing side, fully built in-house.
Most of my tasks included building features for the v2.0 of the product,
which consisted of a completely updated UX and UI.
- Technologies used: PHP, Laravel, Blade, JavaScript, SCSS. -
Working on migrating the most complex components from TWIG, a PHP-based templating language, to React, with the
ultimate goal of making our app easier to work with, scale and maintain.
This project included re-structuring the codebase to a component-based logic, in order to better accommodate the scaling possibility given by React. -
Migrating the whole website codebase to Next JS, in order to take advantage
of the power of SSR within a React-based framework.
Together with the Growth and data team, we saw the need of improving the site performances, speed and SEO. For this reason, I worked on migrating the whole codebase, which was built in TWIG and React client-side, to Next JS, allowing to render our content through SSR or SSG while still keeping the flexibility given by React. Besides the core migration, I also focussed on refactoring, implementing JS in CSS solutions, and removing stale code in order to set the foundations for a new application that was easily scalable and without legacy.
For this project I also set up automatic deployments through Vercel, building CI/CD Pipelines within a self-hosted GitLab project.
- Technologies used: Next JS, TypeScript, styled-components, NextAuth, Vercel, PHP basics. -
Converting our main app to a downloadable Progressive Web App (PWA).
For this project, I converted our large application into a downloadable PWA, with the final goal of providing our users with a better experience on our site. This project included displaying notifications via both the Notifications API and the Push API (server side), which I implemented by integrating Firebase and Firebase Cloud Messaging to our application. - Occasional improvements and fixes on other company's apps, domains and web pages.
Frontend developer
Codaisseur Code Academy, Amsterdam
2018 - 2022
Codaisseur is the first Code Academy in The Netherlands. Digital products included the students' Learning Platform & Hub, the Admin, the CMS website, and more.
Responsibilities:
-
Built, optimized and maintained the new company website codaisseur.com
(headless CMS),
enabling the site's content to be 100% customizable with a no-code interface.
For this project, besides the actual coding, I've been working closely with the growth team as a Product Owner, helping them defining their issues and collecting their needs, guiding them through the possible solutions and implementations, filling up the backlog, and prioritizing the features for development, while gathering their feedback on a regular basis.
This project resulted in a more efficient and independent team. The growth team no longer needs devs for testing and optimizing changes on the website, nor for integrating several features with external third-party apps (read Intercom, Hubspot, Typeform, Eventbrite, etc). This freed up several developer-hours per week, which we could then invest in building the two newest applications: the Student Hub and Admin.
- Technologies used: React, Styled Components, Prismic CMS, GraphQL. - Isolated and documented all the website's slices and components on Storybook JS, and created a complete exercise-driven online course for non-developer colleagues on how to effectively use the new CMS.
-
Built the frontend for the new company Admin and for the new
Student Hub apps.
- Technologies used: React, Styled Components, Typescript, GraphQL. - Built a custom company theme (npm package) by translating the new design system into a shared library of reusable web components.
- General maintainance, bug fix and improvements of the main company's apps and web pages, front and back-end.
- Facilitated the sprint retrospectives and the company-wide Show & Tell sessions.
- Occasional Teacher Assistant, helping students throughout projects and assignments.
Marketing Lead
Codaisseur Code Academy, Amsterdam
2018 - 2019
Responsibilities:
- Responsible for paid and organic marketing, analytics, CRO and SEO.
- Responsible for defining and measuring the marketing KPIs and the company's marketing strategy.
- Guided and collaborated with the team throughout projects in a Holacracy-powered organization.
Digital Marketing Consultant
Freelance, Amsterdam
2015 - 2019
- During my time as a freelancer I worked on several projects covering SEA, PPC, CRO and growth marketing, marketing strategy, web analytics, A/B testing, social media ads and content, competitive research analysis, Wordpress websites creation and optimization, and more.
Digital Marketer
Uxebu GMBH, Munich
2014
Responsibilities:
- PPC, SEO, web analytics, A/B testing, social media ads and content, Wordpress.
- JS Code Retreat: together with my mentor, I started the JavaScript Code Retreat, a regular intensive practive event, focusing on the fundamentals of software development and design. We organized the JS Code Retreat in multiple cities, throughout all Europe.
Social Media and Digital Marketer
Pixelplant GMBH, Munich
2013-2014
Responsibilities:
- PPC, A/B testing, social media ads and content, Wordpress.
Education 👩🎓
CODAISSEUR CODE ACADEMY
Full-Stack JavaScript diploma, Amsterdam
2018
Codaisseur is an intensive Code Academy focusing on Full-Stack JavaScript
development. During the Academy, I learned how to build complete stacks composed
of HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript ES6, React, Redux, Node.js, TypeScript, TypeORM, Jest,
and PostgreSQL. Project workflow included standard practices such as TDD,
UX design, Git and Scrum.
MSc BUSINESS SCIENCE
University of Trieste, Italy - full marks cum laude
2011-2013
BSc INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS
University of Trieste, Italy
2007-2011
Recommendations 🥹
Jack Dunn
Head of Product & Technology @TNW - a Financial Times company
I managed Irene as the Head of Product & Technology at TNW (a Financial Times company). Irene has been an absolute pleasure to work with in every sense. Perfectly combining stellar development skills, endless curiosity – especially related to new technologies and how that impacts the world we all live in, attention to detail and an acute understanding of business. Irene was promoted to a Frontend Tech Lead under my leadership, a promotion she very much deserved. In this position, Irene acted with autonomy and independently created workflows and processes to improve how we develop for our frontend. Much of this work will continue to serve TNW for many years to come. She also worked very closely with counterparts at the Financial Times to identify improvement areas, and knowledge sharing opportunities. Irene has a natural talent in coaching other team members, thinks holistically about front-end architecture and naturally wants to improve things for the better. As Frontend Tech Lead, Irene took an active role in solving complex, ambiguous problems, and setting a clear path for the other developers to follow, while actively collecting, listening to and considering feedback from the team. As well as all of the hard skills and knowledge Irene brings, she is also brings an energy which shapes and adds to the team culture. She communicates in a way that brings out the best in others, is empathetic and is guided by a strong moral compass which makes her incredibly adaptable in terms of working with a diverse group of people. I would have no doubts about recommending Irene to any high-performance development team that wants to grow and improve processes, measurably improve upon the end product, and appreciates strong developers taking an active role in shaping the company and team culture. I would jump at an opportunity to work with Irene again.
Ronan O'Leary
CTO @TNW - a Financial Times company
I hired Irene as a Frontend Developer at TNW, and she was a direct report of mine in my capacity as CTO/Engineering Manager. From the very beginning, Irene's skills, innate curiosity, drive and enthusiasm really set her apart, both as an employee and a engineer. Irene genuinely loves, enjoys, lives and breathes Web Development as a discipline, whilst always being eager and willing to adopt new tools, languages, workflows and methods to achieve a project's objectives. One of the first things that strikes you when working with Irene is her attention to detail. Before any talk of design or a line of code has been written, she takes the necessary time to fully understand a project's end goal, or indeed a problem's root cause. You realise this is why she works so well. In a very efficient and effective way, she acquires an acute understanding of the project goals, but she's also guides users and colleagues through the project workflow and helps stakeholders and collaborators alike to develop a better understanding of the possible issues that may crop up during a project's development. Essentially, she's identified problems and potential solutions before they've even arisen! This has proved invaluable in keeping project deadlines and managing expectations within the business. It's also this ability to work out potential solutions that makes Irene such an adept developer. Like any good developer, she views any potential coding issues as a challenge to be solved, rather than something to be avoided. Through all my time working with Irene, her enthusiasm in creating functional solutions to achieve and exceed a project's objectives have helped the business (on numerous occasions) in not only delivering a project of high standards, but also in generating new ideas for projects/features which may not have realised during a planning or design stage. It is my genuine pleasure to highly recommended Irene De Nicolo. Irene is an exceptionally talented dev, whose skills are only growing. She has an excellent ability to effectively listen and to proceed with each task at hand, both large and small. Irene is detail oriented, well organised and also cares about visual style guides, comps, and code examples to work collaboratively to develop a user interface and template system that meets our needs. She's a very accomplished developer and a kind and genuinely delightful person to work with.
Danny van der jagt
Product team lead @Codaisseur
It was an absolute joy to work together with Irene. Irene is a skilled and passionate front-end developer with extensive knowledge and skill in the latest technologies and is able to build beautiful digital products. Along with her in-depth knowledge and experience in business and digital marketing, she proved to be excellent at cross-discipline projects and project management, resulting in on-point and next-level results. With her energetic, positive and empathic personality, she aligns and coaches people to excel while bringing a supportive and easy-going vibe to every team. Irene is social, dedicated, coachable and always eager to learn and grow. She proved to be loyal, trustworthy, and an overall wonderful person to be around. All around, she was fundamental to the success and happiness of the team and an inspiration to me. Thank you for our time together, all the things you've taught me, and every team would be lucky to get to work together with you!
Miloud Ourahou
Growth team lead @Codaisseur
Irene has been a great developer to work with. She has proven to be an excellent front-end developer experienced with the latest technologies. With strong UX skills and a background in marketing, Irene was a crucial asset to have on the growth team. Irene is a social, energetic and empathic team player that forms the binding link in any team. She has strong project management skills and knows how to present work to developers and non-developers. Great professional and awesome human being.
Philipp Toepelmann
Entrepreneur and Business Angel
It's rare that you come across such a talented and nice person like Irene. Irene and I have worked closely together for several years. She has extensive experience in digital marketing and was developing and executing successful online marketing campaigns in Google Adwords, Bing Ads, Facebook Ads and Instagram Ads etc. I was particularly impressed by her ability (and passion) to learn extremely quickly which is so important in the startup and tech world. Besides being a remarkable marketing specialist she is also a very nice, positive and intelligent person with a great sense of humor :)