Nigel Stewart
I've been writing software professionally for about seven years — mostly backends, infrastructure, and full-stack web apps.
I spent a couple of years leading a small engineering team at BC Children's Hospital, building tools used in clinical and research settings.
7 years experience • backend / infra leaning
Currently based in Winnipeg, open to full-time roles (remote is great)
Selected Work
VR/MRI Preparation Application
VR experience to help kids get comfortable with MRI machines before their scans. The idea was to reduce anxiety enough that they wouldn't need sedation. Part of a clinical study — results were published.
Activity Reporting System
Internal tool for BC Children's Hospital residents to log and get approval on yearly extracurricular activities. Built the whole thing — API, frontend, auth, deployment on Azure. Ran in production at the hospital.
PanelOS — distributed signage system
Built a real-time system for controlling Raspberry Pi displays remotely. Commands reach displays in milliseconds via WebSocket. Go backend handles auth and orchestration; Centrifugo manages the WebSocket layer. The goal was basically: set it up once and not have to think about it again. It’s been running without much intervention.
rmap-lite
Port scanner I wrote in Rust to learn Tokio. Ended up being reasonably fast — handles a lot of concurrent connections without falling over. Code is on GitHub if you want to look at it.
coldwatersharp.ca
Site for a local knife sharpening business I run on the side. Built with Astro. Has a contact form that tracks where leads come from so I know which channels are actually working.
RagingBull.com
Stock trading education platform — video content, subscriber management, live streaming via WebRTC so people could watch instructor trades in real time. Built at Graphem. The company later had a run-in with the FTC, but the tech was solid.
Child-Sized Knowledge Translation
Interactive storybook helping kids and families understand clinical research and how to get involved. Collaboration with researchers at BC Children's and UBC.
Canadian Child Safety Report Card
Public-facing site presenting national child safety and injury prevention research. Deployed publicly — one of several tools we shipped at the Digital Lab for researchers and policymakers.
MC14500B Microprocessor Simulator
Cycle-accurate simulator of a 1-bit industrial control unit, written in Rust. Built it to understand how hardware actually works at the fetch-decode-execute level. Has a trace mode so you can watch register state at every clock edge.
Nand2Tetris
Worked through the whole course — built ALU, RAM, CPU from scratch in HDL, then wrote an assembler and VM translator. Good way to spend a few weekends.
Based in Winnipeg. Looking for a full-time role — backend, infra, or full-stack work. Remote preferred.
Notebook
Notes on things I've built, bugs I've hit, and choices along the way.
PanelOS: Building a Real-Time Display Control System in Go
How I architected a real-time digital signage system in Go — WebSocket delivery via Centrifugo, JWT auth, and Raspberry Pi deployment that hasn't needed touching since.
Read more →Is Your ATS Working Against You?
Most resumes don't fail because the experience isn't there. They fail because the words are wrong. Here's the framework I built to fix that.
Read more →The Scroll Sentinel Pattern: Scroll-Driven Reveals Without Hijacking the Browser
How a tall invisible div and a bit of math gives you a smooth, step-by-step scroll animation that works with touch, trackpad, keyboard, and assistive tech -- for free.
Read more →AI Coding Agents Introduced Me to Bugs I Didn't Know Existed
Working with Claude Code to add portfolio screenshots surfaced two obscure bugs I'd never have found on my own — and wouldn't have known to look for.
Read more →