I build and create delightful user experiences
Rachael Metcalf
Professional UI/Full Stack
Engineer since 2017
Who am I?
Hey! I'm Rachael or Rae! I'm a programmer that also dabbles in other hobbies like drawing, crafting, sewing, cosplaying, writing, and more! I love being creative and bringing something from an abstract idea into something tangible and real. I'm a huge Nintendo nerd and a natural-born Texan, currently residing in the beautiful Austin, Texas! I'm a huge fan of pastel anything, and my current obsession is cute colorful pastel keyboards. I'm also a huge fan of gaming in general, especially Pokémon! I enjoy being with friends either online or in-person (when that was a thing) or hanging out on my couch playing games on my Nintendo Switch, getting lost in its games' fantastical worlds.
What am I?
I've been a professional software engineer for about four years since graduating from the University of Texas with a BS in Computer Science in 2017. Since then, I have gained experience building products from pre-launch to launch phases and working within teams and ecosystems big and small. I have a huge passion for building unique and pleasant user experiences. I'm UX and UI obsessed and have also designed some UI's myself. I'm a strong advocate for the user and work to ensure code is clean, readable, and will result in a fantastic user experience. I also do game development and content creation in my free time, creating art to share with the world.
What have I done?
Software Engineer
Nexus is a startup that provides content creators with a platform to design and build their own game stores, giving them a portion of the revenue from each purchase they help drive. Working in React and Typescript, I took it from prototype to launch and beyond, supporting the product with frequent updates, including bug fixes and new features. I worked closely with product and design to quickly deliver and craft the best experience for our creators, wearing multiple hats when necessary to reach our goals. I worked on both creator-facing and customer-facing features, working in both the front-end and back-end portions of the codebase. We got up to an average monthly user base of 64k and an NPS score of 50, and the GMV increasing by 200% from October 2020 to March 2021.
Software Engineer
After two successful summer internships in 2015 and 2016, Vrbo hired me full-time to work on internal tools and applications. I designed and developed applications from concept to deployment that worked with new bleeding-edge technologies, both internal and external, including React, Redux, MongoDB, and new internal application frameworks. I worked to find issues and document and create tutorials for their use within our tech stack. I then moved to work on the Profile team to build out new features and pages for users to manage their data, take epics, and break them down into detailed, workable tickets. Alongside that, I revived an internal training organization for junior developers. I organized presentations, managed volunteers, gave talks, and mentored members in tooling, frameworks, career advice, etc.