Tyler Nickerson
🔍️

Tyler Nickerson

Design Engineer in Seattle, WA, He/him

Looking for product design or design engineering work. Let's chat!

5 months ago

About

Hey there! 👋 I'm Tyler, a founder, designer, and developer based out of Seattle, WA.

I absolutely love creating products and telling stories through user experience and brand.

Work with me ➡️ kojo.design

Contact

LinkedIn
GitHub

Projects

2022
Lighthouse

Collaborated with my close friend to design a logo and mobile application for his side-project called Lighthouse.

2022

I collaborated very closely with the founder of a scuba diving mobile app to create the company's branding, as well as design the main screens of the mobile application.

I created wireframes for the product, user personas, as well as the final high-fis.

Work Experience

2023 — Now
Seattle, WA

Started a one-man, design-as-a-subscription agency for early stage founders and technical teams.

2023 — 2023

In late 2022, I co-founded Linguistic along with a partner I met through the On Deck Founders fellowship. In January of 2023, I left my job to pursue the company full-time.

While Linguistic began as an end-to-end immersion platform for language learners, it eventually evolved into an AI-powered up-skilling platform for ESL professionals. With that evolution came a great deal of growth and iteration as an engineer, a designer, and a leader.

As both the CTO & the company's design leader, I designed and built the core foundation of our platform using SvelteKit, NestJS, Python, and a slew of other technologies. I created the company's design system from scratch, hired our first two engineers, and actively worked alongside our CPO to craft and refine the user experience of the platform using Figma.

I also led the re-design of our company's marketing pages as well as several core product features such as Language Genie, Learn Popups, and Learning Pathways.

2022 — 2023
San Francisco, CA

While at Baseten, I worked alongside a team of other full-stack and frontend engineers to shape the core experience of the company's flagship platform.

Working closely with design, I helped lead several new product initiatives such as a refreshed user onboarding experience, new model management UX, and a brand-new models hub for deploying pre-trained models on your account.

I overhauled the architecture of the product's client-side networking layer, as well as craft product mockups in Figma for a new logging experience.

2019 — 2022
Mountain View, CA

At Coursera, I led the development of several learner-facing initiatives, including:

  • Learner goal setting

  • Syncing deadlines with your calendar

  • Real-time in-app messaging to motivate learners

Furthermore, I helped to revamp the product's infrastructure, carrying the migration of several legacy frontend components from BackboneJS to React 15.

2018 — 2018
Mountain View, CA

My primary role at Udacity involved maintaining the company's marketing website, as well as crafting a number of landing pages for different promotional initiatives.

In 2018, I spearheaded the development of the company's homepage and catalog refresh, as well as invented internal tooling to facilitate the easy creation of new landing pages.

During this time, I learned several new technologies on the job, including Angular 6 and RxJS.

2016 — 2016
Cambridge, MA

During my short time at KAYAK, I redesigned and re-implemented the cross-sell advertisements on booking receipts from the ground up using a custom, self-made framework. Coined XSell, the new code was written using a mix of Java, LESS, jQuery, and HTML and came complete with automatic server logging and client-side asynchronous analytics.

Built on top of Spring and Velocity.

2015 — 2015
Cambridge, MA

At edX, I added the first JavaScript unit testing framework to the e-commerce site, and was the first to begin work on the Course Admin Tool (CAT).

The CAT is an internal tool for course administrators to easily add and modify course seats without needing to mess with any low-end configurations. The tool uses a clean UI to simplify the process of course management, and allows users to add verified course options, professional education courses, and more with ease.

In addition, the tool was one of the first projects to fully implement the edX Pattern Library, which was just starting to gain traction during my time there.

2014 — 2014
Worcester, MA

My very first professional job was working alongside two founders out of their garage in Worcester, MA. There I assisted with development, re-designed their homepage and created advertisements to land deals.

I began by writing stored procedures for the SQL Server backend and adding new platform features using ASP .NET and VBScript. However, after designing a few advertisements for my boss, not only were they the new highlights of his pitch presentations, but I was promoted to redesigning the entire site homepage using just CSS and HTML.

Side Projects

Ongoing

Created an online lofi music station that allows you to virtually tour cities around the world. Launched in mid-2023, popularity has since exploded – especially in Japan – with the site seeing tens of thousands of visitors since its release.

I designed and built the site's UI and UX from scratch, as well as its logo and all promotional images.

Ongoing

Created a fast, tiny file format for storing offline lexical data using Google Flatbuffers. Originally written in C++ in 2017, the project since migrated to Go and was presented at the eLex lexicography conference in Brno, Czechia in the spring of 2023.

2022

Created a wrapper around the browser Media API to make recording in-browser a breeze. Used at Linguistic to power its voice lessons.

2022

A collection of dark-themed color palettes taken from popular apps.

2016

Created a simple shim around the JavaScript Notifications API back when support across browsers was spotty. It's now one of the most popular desktop push notification libraries, with over 4.8M downloads worldwide and 8k+ GitHub stars.

Speaking

2023
Brno, Czechia

Presented The Open Dictionary Project, a file format for lexical data, at the eLex lexicography conference in Brno, Czechia in 2023.

2018

You don’t need an art degree to make your website beautiful

2018

How to make an MVP that doesn't suck

2017

Wrote a tutorial that was published in the September 2017 issue of net (out of publication since 2020) that detailed how to set up push notifications on your website using Push.js and Firebase Cloud Messaging.

Awards

2017
Mason's Emerging Innovation Award from Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Won the Mason's Emerging Innovation Award in 2017 for my research on the platform that would eventually become Linguistic.

2016
Kalenian Award from Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Myself, as well as the remainder of the ACAP team, received the prestigious Kalenian Award from WPI to further advance the progress of the ACAP project during the project's active development in 2016.

Education