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Ash Connolly

Software Engineer

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Using React, JavaScript, Next.js, and Cypress daily. Currently at SkyBet where I build applications for millions of users. I love React, front end architecture, component libraries, and design systems. I’ve been doing this for 9 years and had the pleasure of working with large clients like the BBC, WWF, and Microsoft. Further details on my skills and experience can be found on my C.V.

Previous clients

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Work

Sky Betting & Gaming

Developing a high performance login interface

I helped develop what is currently the fastest login interface in the betting industry. Comprised of a SSR login interface using React, Redux & Next JS. With a high traffic login page, experiencing upwards of 300 logins per second, delivering a fast and lightweight experience is vital. We carried out multiple performance audits in order to make the site as lightweight possible. These changes can massively improve user experience, user engagement, and impact company revenue.

Myself and another engineer developed a boilerplate application island, using Yarn Workspaces and Next.js, to solve tribe-wide scaling and performance issues. Further details of my work at SkyBet can be found on my C.V.

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Man & Van

Building a hybrid, cross platform, mobile app

Man & Van is a mobile application that makes it easy for users to find a reliable man and van nearby. Using React I developed the front end, creating all components, routing and interactions. This web app was built using Phonegap to generate an application for both IOS and Android devices. Alongside this I created a component library to make building interfaces as quick and easy as possible.

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World Wildlife Fund

Building a new component based front end system for one of the worlds largest charities

I had the pleasure of leading the front end development for one of the worlds largest charities. I created a flexible, component based front end system, coding guidelines and a living styleguide to make future updates and site maintenance as easy as possible. This made it easy to create unique page layouts by choosing from a selection of components. It also helped developers working on the site, but most importantly it led to a better, more consistent, user experience for site visitors.

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UAccount

Creating a new front end architecture from the ground up

I led the front end development in building a new, scalable and robust front end architecture, combined with a living component library. This allowed developers to be more effective and agile, but most importantly led to a better UX for our users. I introduced front end guidelines covering everything from principles to code structure. I carried out front end performance audits, implemented site speed improvements, trained other members of staff to help expand their front end skills and improve their understanding of scalable design systems. I also built the foundations of an entirely new React based front end.

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Testimonials

Tom Hoyland

Tom Hoyland

Senior Agile & DevOps Delivery Lead

Ash is a brilliant and talented software engineer, and an asset to any product or engineering team. I’ve been working with Ash for over a year on a range of products, and on each one he’s helped to build a fast, responsive and efficient customer user experience. Ash is conscientious and inclusive when designing and thorough when building. If you have an Ash on your team, you’re incredibly lucky.

Will White

Will White

Software Engineer

Ash is an excellent software developer, whose eye to UI design, performance and technology have been instrumental in building clean, responsive products with an unparalleled User Experience. The work Ash has done to rebuild our login system has enabled us to reach far beyond our previous performance expectations...

Side Projects

Episode Ratings

Episode Ratings helps you see if a show gets better or worse over time. Features include episode rating graph, "Where to watch" info based on your location, best & worst episodes, episode summaries, and similar shows.

It's built with React, Next.js, EmotionCSS, Tailwind, MongoDB and pulls data from two APIs. To keep the site peformant I've used Next.js' incremental static regeneration. The most popular pages are generated at build time (which will load instantly for users), and other pages are statically generated on first visit (then instantly availble for all subsequent users).

The site uses Zustand for app state, EmotionCSS for complex styling, Cypress for e2e tests, Storybook for component library, react-element-query for container queries, Apex Charts for graphs, and react-multi-carousel for content carousels.

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Front End Development Guidelines for HTML and CSS

HTML and CSS guidelines for creating scalable and maintainable front end structures, using logical, component based CSS. Covering concepts and principles through to specific CSS structure. Particularly useful is you are not using a CSS-in-JS tool and choosing to manage your own global css. I have built up these guidelines over several years, working various roles at different organisations.

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Line Height Adjuster (acquired)

A chrome extension that allows you to adjust the line height of any website to give a better reading experience. It offers a simple slider to adjust line height within a reasonable range, but if more line height is required you can enter a value in a manual entry box.

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RawGit for Github (deprecated)

This chrome extension allows you to quickly convert Github links to RawGit links so that they can be used in development or production environments. It uses the brilliant RawGit, by Ryan Grove, to serves raw files directly from GitHub with proper content-type headers.

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Writing

A More Seamless Workflow – Style Guides For Better Design And Development

An article outlining the effectiveness of style guide driven workflows, and how they benefit both the design and development of an interface.

It's been recommended by an industry leader, and has featured on both the Marvel Blog and FreeCodeCamp medium publication, and reached over 47,000 views.

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Prevent "window is not defined" Errors With a useClientSide() Custom Hook

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The benefits of skeleton screens / content placeholders and how to make them

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