About
Rafael Derolez is a freelance front-end engineer with a strong focus on user interfaces and experience working remotely from Ghent, Belgium.
Work Experience
Projects
Migrated a legacy Magento site to a headless Next.js + Shopify e-commerce setup. This improved improved overall usability, significantly enhanced the development and content editing workflows, and provided a much better user experience.
Created and maintained internal component libraries and configs, all built & published to npm using GitHub workflows.
Next.js • Shopify • Sanity.io • Chakra UI • TypeScript
Design by Lorenz Woehr.
A health-inspired variant of Wordle. It features a clean redesign with extra features such as clues, fun facts, puzzle feedback, giveaways, and CMS support.
Next.js • Sanity.io • Tailwind CSS
Huge team collaboration to migrate from a 10+ year old PHP setup to a more modern setup using React with a GraphQL Backend-for-Frontend.
Close collaboration with the UI team to lay the groundwork for the design system, and more importantly rebuild the signup flow which saw a solid increase in conversion.
React.js • GraphQL • styled-components
Semi-brutalist One Pager sporting several gradient bursts as you scroll for brand consultancy Hello Astro.
Gatsby • Sanity.io
Greenfield rebuild for ICON Printing, a UK-based custom clothing printing company. It's running Next.js with styled-components for styling. Prismic.io houses all of the content on the marketing pages, and WordPress's GraphQL endpoint was used for the blog.
The heart of the site really lies in the quote tool which allows the user to choose from different types of garments, customisation options, and printing techniques.
Next.js • styled-components • Prismic.io • WordPress
Contributed to the development and maintenance of the Everpress website, a leading online marketplace for custom merchandise.
A/B tested the Guest Checkout to successfully increase conversion
Launched new marketing and event pages to promote the brand and engage customers.
React • Tailwind CSS • Prismic.io
Collaborated with the design and marketing teams to develop an animation-led website to promote Fnatic Gear's gaming hardware.
Developed the website using industry-standard practices to ensure optimal performance and cross-browser compatibility, especially regarding video and animations.
Implemented a Shopify integration to enable customers to purchase products directly from the site. The successful launch of the hardware products and website resulted in increased brand awareness.
Gatsby • Shopify
Team effort at Neverbland for 'Mariah or Messiah' as part of a hackathon with the aim of creating a fun (and rather silly!) Christmas card. Whilst generating publicity for Neverbland, it also helped raise money for the Hackney Winter Night Shelter charity. The quiz makes heavy use of GSAP to take care of all the animations.
React • GSAP
Side Projects
Still working on this one! I can share a few details when we have a chat.
Speaking
CodePen meetup hosted by Dogstudio where I gave a quick 15-min tutorial about how to build an interactive mouse-animation that was very popular at the time.
Awards
Hello Astro
Mariah or Messiah