Vanita Barrett-smith
Senior Product Engineer at Baby Stops
Mole Valley, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolVanita Barrett-Smith is a Senior Product Engineer and founder with 8 years' experience building accessible, user-centred web interfaces across frontend and full-stack environments. Currently shaping the frontend of Which?’s core site, she blends hands-on React and NodeJS development with pragmatic product engineering—driving prototyping, testing, and inclusive design practices. Her prior technical leadership at the Government Digital Service includes notable contributions to the widely used GOV.UK Design System and frontend libraries, where she improved accessibility, cookie consent UX, and analytics consent integration. She has also delivered measurable product work at John Lewis’s checkout and on high-profile government services like Brexit and COVID-19 tools. A proponent of healthy team culture and continuous learning, she pairs strong engineering craft with empathy for teammates and users.
8 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's Degree, Computing and Information Technology (with a Year in Industry), Bachelor's Degree, Computing and Information Technology (with a Year in Industry) at University of SurreyHigh School, A-Levels, High School, A-Levels at Nonsuch High School for Girls
Stackoverflow
683reputation
52kreached
13answers
14questions
Github Skills (19)
accessibility10
javascript10
google-analytics10
css10
ruby10
html10
back-end-development9
system-design9
rails9
front-end-development9
ruby-on-rails9
backend9
system9
encryption6
nodejs6
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
alphagov/govuk-frontend
Mar 2020 - Sep 2022
GOV.UK Frontend contains the code you need to start building a user interface for government platforms and services.
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:6 releases, 373 reviews, 493 commits in 2 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Vanita primarily contributed to the development and enhancement of GOV.UK Frontend components. Their work involved implementing new features like a collapseOnMobile flag for breadcrumbs and spellcheck options for textarea and input components. They also addressed usability issues by preserving the state of character counts when navigating back, and resolved a bug relating to character count functionality. Further, they released a new version of the package.
govuser-interfaceweb-appplatformsjavascript
alphagov/govuk-design-system
Jul 2020 - Sep 2022
One place for service teams to find styles, components and patterns for designing government services.
Role in this project:Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:178 reviews, 182 commits, 130 PRs in 2 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Vanita primarily contributed to the front-end development of the GOV.UK Design System, focusing on enhancing user experience and accessibility. Their work included adding JavaScript functionality to the cookie banner, fixing issues with IE support, and adding functionality to the cookie settings, the mobile navigation and the tabs component. They also implemented features related to Google Analytics, including loading the analytics script based on user consent.
placereactstyles-componentsgovuk-design-systemstyles
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.