Wills Bithrey

Core skills

• HTML
• CSS (Sass, styled-components)
• JavaScript/TypeScript (React, AngularJS, Backbone.js)
• Metaframeworks (Gatsby, Next.js)
• State Management (Redux, React Context etc.)
• Build Tools (Webpack, TypeScript, Closure Compiler)
• Web Components
• Testing (Mocha, Sinon, Jest, Testing Library, Cypress, Visual regression testing)
• Storybook
• A/B Testing & Experimentation
• Design Systems
• Headless UI (Radix)
• Performance optimization (DevTools, WebPageTest, Lighthouse)
• Accessibility Testing (VoiceOver, NVDA)
• Building, maintaining and optimizing CI/CD pipelines (CircleCI/GitLab)

Additional skills

• Edge Computing (Cloudflare Workers)
• Integrating with LLMs (OpenAI API)
• Progressive Web Apps
• HTML Email Development
• Git
• Three.js
• Full-stack development
• Express
• Python
• Django
• Docker
• Redis
• MongoDB
• PostgreSQL
• Figma

Employment history

1. Farewill

   September 2021–Present
   Senior Front-End Engineer
   🏆 Won award for the Act Intrapreneurial value at Farewill's values awards in December 2024.

   Responsibilities

   Scoping, planning and building features for a variety of applications including our marketing website, online wills application and other supporting internal and user-facing applications.

   Implemented third-party A/B testing tooling across Farewill's applications to allow us to run experiments and measure the impact on business metrics such as subscription opt-in rate & gift inclusion rate.

   Driving improvements in engineering quality across the engineering team by sharing information and best practices, introducing new tooling and mentoring other engineers to help improve their front-end skills. For example, I introduced E2E testing for Farewill's online wills application which also included significant backend work (which I also implemented) to enable fast programmatic creation of temporary test accounts during runs of the E2E tests leading to increased determinism and reliability of the test suite.

   Project highlights

   • AI Marketing Assistant

     Drove development of an AI-powered marketing assistant to help Farewill's charity partners write compelling and engaging charity-specific email campaigns promoting the charity's free wills service. The Marketing Assistant received positive feedback from early users and is now part of Farewill's standard offering to charity partners.

     Built with: React, Radix UI, OpenAI Assistants API, Cloudflare Workers

   • Internal tool for building HTML emails

     Devised and built Zookeeper, a React-based email authoring system that accelerated email development by approximately 10x while improving the quality and visual consistency of email templates used across the organisation.

     Built with: React Email, Storybook (inc. custom Storybook UI extension)

   • Pledge counter

     Devised and built a real-time pledge counter using Next.js to visualize total amount pledged to charities via Farewill's will writing service, replacing a manual paper poster system and improving organisation-wide visibility. Pulls data directly from Farewill's data warehouse. App is now displayed on all meeting room TVs as a screensaver.

     Built with: Next.js, SWR, Framer Motion, Express, BigQuery SDK

   • Automated visual regression testing of PDFs

     Implemented custom visual regression testing for our PDF generator and integrated it into our CI pipeline to prevent regressions in generated PDF output and significantly increase the team's confidence in shipping changes to the system.

     Built with: Bash scripting, Imagemagick, CircleCI

2. Potato London

   Senior Front-end Developer – October 2015–September 2021
   Front-end Developer – January 2013–September 2015
   Freelance Front-end Developer – September 2011–December 2012

   Responsibilities

   Planning, architecting and building small and large scale front-end web projects, estimating work for proposals, mentoring other developers, assisting with hiring. Involved with a number of high profile projects for Google. These sites involved large traffic loads and stringent requirements in terms of aesthetics, accessibility, and performance.

   As a member of Potato's Quality and Accessibility guilds I researched, planned and implemented systems, wrote documentation and code samples to help developers improve and maintain the quality of Potato's projects.

   Additionally took ownership of maintaining the office network infrastructure, building an audio-visual team responsible for streaming and recording in-house and public events, and implementing hardware solutions to enable this.

   Project highlights

   • Event Check-In PWA

     Led a project to build Potato's first offline-first Progressive Web App for a high profile client's event management system. The application integrated with the existing event management system to sync the attendee list to IndexedDB for offline access. Included an attendee search supporting fuzzy matching for attendee names containing diacritics, a QR scanner for scanning guest tickets, support for checking attendees in at an event or session level and more, all available offline with changes automatically synced to the backend in the background.

     Built with: AngularJS, IndexedDB, Background Sync API, CSS Painting API, Web Workers

   • Invite Manager

     Led implementation of a design system and provided extensive styleguide documentation for both designers and developers to facilitate review, testing and reuse of components. Web Components were used to add behaviour to components built using a custom component system for Django templates inspired by Jinja2's macros.

     Built with: Django, Web Components, Sass

   • Google Art Project Hangouts

     Worked closely with a UX designer to deliver a great user experience focused around sharing and exploring artwork with friends and teachers in a Google Hangout. The application was demoed at Google I/O as an example of what can be built on the platform.

     The project had a short time frame, and to help speed up development I built a Hangouts API emulator which allowed the project to run offline without the need for repeated deployments and creation of real video calls, resulting in a more than 10x reduction in time between making a code change and testing in the browser.

     Built with: Django, Backbone.js, LESS, Google Hangouts API

3. Netociety

   June 2009–August 2010
   Technical Project Manager

   Responsibilities

   Core product development, writing specifications for client projects, managing client instances and performing client specific development work.