Niels Nielsen

UI Engineer

Data Visualizer

Tech Lead

I am a software engineer with experience building data-intensive dashboards that simplify comprehension by using graphics and animations that can be understood at a glance.

I collaborate with designers and product owners to quickly prototype and demo new features. I have extensive real-world experience taking ideas from prototype to production. Once deployed, I set up integration tests and real-time health monitoring to ensure the feature operates correctly at all times.

To scale up the UI team, I evaluate candidates, make hiring decisions, and set up onboarding processes to ensure new team members are productive and ready to contribute from day one. I am always available to assist fellow engineers who need direction or help working through a problem.

Portfolio

1. ProtectWise

First UI engineer hired by the founders, later became tech lead for the UI and customer-facing API.
Collaborated with special effects artist Jake Sargeant (Tron Legacy, Oblivion) to design, build, and launch the ProtectWise user interface demonstrated in the video above.
Pushed the limits of browser technology at the time to deliver a dynamic and responsive user interface typically only seen in desktop applications.
Made use of scaled vector graphics (SVG) for visualizations, web workers for performing CPU-heavy tasks off of the main UI thread, and WebSockets for bidirectional real-time communication between the UI and API.
Built a custom WebSocket API that would subscribe to Kafka data streams to aggregate, format, and deliver live streaming data to meet the unique data requirements needed to drive the UI.
Helped grow the company by interviewing and making the final call in the hiring process for new engineers on the UI and API teams.
Built health check systems to immediately send an alert to PagerDuty whenever the API was having troubles performing its required tasks.
Helped prototype experimental 3D immersive interfaces using the Oculus/Meta Quest and the Microsoft HoloLens.

2. WebSocket Text Relay

I built this tool because I needed a way to develop complex SVG visualizations and the existing feedback loop delay between making code changes and seeing them show up in the browser was taking too long. Even a 5-second delay to build the app and refresh the page is disruptive when I need to make several changes per second in order to fine-tune things like colors, size, spacing, etc. For years this project existed as a quickly hacked-together Vim plugin that was only set up to work on my machine.

I wanted to create a portfolio project that demonstrated how I was able to build the ProtectWise UI, so I turned this side project into a tool that any web developer can understand, install, and use in their own text editor. I first converted the app to use the Language Server Protocol (LSP) to be able to communicate with any LSP-compatible text editor. Using the tool itself, I created a status UI (pictured above) that allows users to view the current status of the running servers and connected frontend clients. Finally, I published the language server along with the text editor plugins and a few examples of how to use them on GitHub.

Language Server: https://github.com/niels4/websocket-text-relay
Vite Plugin: https://github.com/niels4/vite-plugin-websocket-text-relay
Neovim Plugin: https://github.com/niels4/websocket-text-relay.nvim
VSCode Extension: https://github.com/niels4/websocket-text-relay-vscode

3. Advent of Code

I use Advent of Code as a fun way to practice my algorithm skills and learn new languages. My most recent work in TypeScript focuses on high-performance data structures, including KD-Trees and heaps that operate on continuous strided arrays. This mirrors the way data is handled in WebGPU for complex visualizations.

Advent of Code Solutions: https://github.com/niels4/advent-of-code

Work History / LinkedIn / Contact

My complete work history can be found in my LinkedIn Profile LinkedIn Logo

To contact me directly, email me at niels.nielsen@gmail.com

Located in

Denver, Colorado