Rafael Derolez

Rafael Derolez

Front-end Engineer in Ghent, Belgium

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

2018 — 2019
2015 — 2018
2015 — 2015

Projects

Ongoing

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.

2023

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

2021

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

2021

Semi-brutalist One Pager sporting several gradient bursts as you scroll for brand consultancy Hello Astro.

Gatsby • Sanity.⁠io

2020

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

2019

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

2018

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

2017

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

2023
Secret 🤫

Still working on this one! I can share a few details when we have a chat.

Speaking

2018
Dogstudio

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.

Contact

LinkedIn
GitHub
Instagram
Twitter