Nigel Stewart
Software engineer (backend / infrastructure)
Winnipeg, MB · hey@nigelstewart.dev
nigelstewart.dev · github.com/1-bit-wonder · linkedin.com/in/nigeljstewart
Seven years of professional software development. Started as a junior doing WordPress and Laravel work at a small agency in Vancouver. Ended up as technical lead at BC Children's Hospital's Digital Media & Innovation Lab, where I ran a team of six and kept 15+ clinical web applications running for around 20,000 users a month.
Took a few years off from 2021 to 2024 for family — my father passed away and grandfather became sick. Used some of that time to go deeper on systems programming. I'm back full-time now and looking for the next thing.
Generalist with backend leanings. PHP/Laravel and Vue.js are where most of my production hours are, but I've shipped production code in Go, Node.js, Python, and C#. WordPress too, including the kind of installs that make you question your life choices. Rust on a few personal projects. I care about systems that are easy to operate and codebases that don't make the next person miserable.
Experience
- The lab built web and mobile tools for clinical research teams, patients, and internal hospital use. Most of the applications were patient-facing or research-critical, so uptime and compliance mattered.
- Led a team of six. Did code reviews, ran 1:1s, handled hiring when we needed to grow. Moved the whole portfolio — 15+ applications — off manually administered servers onto Azure with Docker and CI/CD. That migration saved around 15 hours a month in deployment and maintenance overhead and made it a lot easier for the team to ship without things catching fire.
- Also helped put together a funding proposal that came through for $500K. Not something I led, but I was in the room and contributed to the technical sections.
- Spent a fair amount of time optimizing slow queries and inefficient code in legacy applications. In the worst cases page loads were taking 10+ seconds — got most of them down to under a second.
- Introduced Datadog for observability. Wrote the onboarding docs. Interviewed candidates. Kept things running.
- Also inherited a set of WordPress installations that had been pushed well past what WordPress was designed for — plugins doing things plugins shouldn't do, custom functionality bolted in at the theme level, the works. Spent real time in there untangling and stabilizing them. It's given me a pretty thorough understanding of how WordPress behaves when someone's been creative with it.
- Built a real-time digital signage system for the waiting room. Go backend (PanelOS) controls displays via WebSocket — commands reach Raspberry Pi clients in milliseconds through Centrifugo. Hasn't needed touching since deployment.
- Also did the initial Raspberry Pi setup: FullPageOS, Tailscale for remote access, Chromium in kiosk mode, PipeWire for audio.
- First real job out of school. Built client websites and web apps, mostly PHP/Laravel backends with Vue.js on the front end. Did a lot of WordPress theme and plugin work. Integrated third-party APIs and CRM systems for clients.
- One of the bigger projects was RagingBull.com — a stock trading education platform with video content, subscriber management, and live streaming via WebRTC. The company later had trouble with the FTC, but the work was interesting.
Projects
VR experience to help kids get comfortable with MRI machines before their scans. The goal was to reduce anxiety enough they wouldn't need sedation. Was part of a clinical study — results were published.
Internal tool for hospital residents to log and get approval on yearly extracurricular activities. Built the whole thing — API, frontend, auth, Azure deployment.
Interactive storybook helping kids and families understand clinical research. Collaboration with researchers at BC Children's and UBC. Built a custom asset loader using Web Workers to preload and cache Adobe Animate assets — cut initial load times by 70%.
Public-facing site presenting national child safety research.
Resource promoting outdoor play for kids. Associated with a published study.
Public health platform promoting healthy daily habits for kids and families.
Stock trading education platform built at Graphem. Video content, subscriber management, live streaming so people could watch instructor trades in real time.
Site for a mental health nonprofit. Helped streamline access to therapy services. Built pro bono.
Real-time digital signage system. Go backend publishes commands to Centrifugo; displays receive them instantly over WebSocket. Built for Raspberry Pi. Hasn't needed babysitting.
Site for a knife sharpening business I run on the side. Contact form tracks where leads come from so I know which channels work.
Tool built into this site. Paste a job description and a Claude-backed API scores the fit, highlights relevant experience, and surfaces gaps. Built with Netlify Functions and the Anthropic SDK.
Port scanner I wrote to learn Tokio. Handles a lot of concurrent connections cleanly. 26,000+ scans/sec if you want a number.
Cycle-accurate simulator of a 1-bit industrial control unit. Built it to understand hardware at the fetch-decode-execute level. Has a trace mode so you can watch register state at every clock edge.
Worked through the whole course. Built ALU, RAM, CPU in HDL then wrote an assembler and VM translator. Good way to spend a few weekends.