Ray Nicholus
Summary
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RockstarRay Nicholus is a Director of Software Engineering with over a decade of experience leading cross-functional teams to modernize mission-critical systems across SD-WAN, cybersecurity, multimedia, and DAM industries. He currently leads engineering at Bigleaf Networks, steering a distributed team through a Kubernetes migration, UI overhaul, and responsible AI adoption that raised engineering velocity and customer retention. Ray combines hands-on development (React, TypeScript, Python) with operational ownership of DevOps, security, and incident management, and has a track record of rebuilding legacy apps into modern, scalable platforms. Previously he directed product and platform rebuilds at Cofense and single-handedly modernized Files.com’s frontend, reflecting a rare blend of tactical execution and strategic planning. An active open-source contributor and author of Beyond jQuery, he has improved popular frontend components (e.g., accessibility and customization in react-tags) and mentors teams on best practices. Based in Waukesha, WI, he’s known for bridging technical and nontechnical stakeholders while institutionalizing hiring, onboarding, and AI-enablement processes.
12 years of coding experience
Stackoverflow
19,758reputation
1.9mreached
661answers
25questions
html
top-1%
file-upload
top-5%
php
top-5%
amazon-s3
top-1%
jquery
top-5%
post
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Github Skills (28)
accessibility10
cors10
javascript10
web-application10
amazon-s310
front-end-development10
html10
react10
post9
ajax9
cross-domain9
jquery9
xmlhttprequest9
autocomplete9
angularjs9
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
react-tags/react-tags
Jan 2016 - Aug 2016
A fantastically simple tagging component for your projects
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:19 commits, 8 PRs, 10 pushes in 6 months
Contributions summary:Ray contributed to the React Tags component, focusing on improving accessibility and functionality. Their work included implementing an `aria-label` attribute to mirror the placeholder text, allowing for custom remove/delete components, enabling automatic selection of the first suggestion, and ensuring that the tab key navigates to focusable elements outside the input. These changes enhance usability and provide flexibility in customizing the component's behavior. Additionally, the user made a change to allow a custom suggestion filter function.
reactjavascriptreact-tagsdragdroptagging
rnicholus/you-dont-need-jquery
Nov 2014 - Feb 2019
End your dependence on jQuery, once and for all.
Contributions:60 commits, 2 PRs, 75 pushes in 4 years 4 months
jquery
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