Welcome

Hi, I’m Rachel

I’m a frontend engineer and engineering leader with more than a decade of experience bringing products from early ideas all the way into people’s hands. While my recent work has focused primarily on frontend engineering, the heart of what I do has always been user experience.

I care deeply about how software feels to use. I’m drawn to the small decisions that make a product feel clear, intuitive, and natural instead of frustrating or overwhelming. I like taking complicated ideas and turning them into experiences that feel simple, thoughtful, and easy to understand.

I also have a strong eye for interface design and a genuine passion for creating products that are both beautiful and functional. I enjoy thinking through visual hierarchy, layout, interaction patterns, and the subtle details that make an interface feel polished, cohesive, and easy to navigate.

View my work See my CV

About Me

I’m someone who is kind, empathetic, and a little quirky

When I’m away from my computer, I’m usually happiest somewhere outside. I love forests, coastlines, mountains, fjords, wildlife, gardening, and foraging. I’m endlessly curious about ecology, history, folklore, and the relationship people have with the natural world.

I love spending time with my family (including my animal family) and also spend a lot of time in the kitchen cooking, baking, and occasionally creating strange fermented things that may or may not develop their own personalities. I enjoy gaming when I want to unwind, especially when it gives me the chance to explore a completely different world for a while.

I tend to find the most joy in small, quiet things, and I’ve always been drawn to the strange, the unseen, and the things we can’t quite explain.

Hiking & the outdoors
The mountains & the sea
Wildlife photography
Gardening
Animals
Ancient history & folklore
Brewing & fermenting
Spooky stuff

Learning Norwegian

I’m currently learning Norwegian and would describe myself as being around an A2 to B1 level. I’m comfortable with everyday conversations and can often follow discussions, especially when people speak at a slightly slower pace, though I still have plenty to learn.

At this point, I wouldn’t consider myself fluent enough to work entirely in Norwegian or confidently lead client discussions in the language. That said, I’m determined to build my life and career here in Norway, and improving my Norwegian is something I actively work on every day. My goal is to become fully fluent, and I’m committed to putting in the time and effort to get there.

My Approach

Empathy drives me

I care deeply about people and therfore their experience, and not only in the sense of making something look good. I care about whether products makes sense, if people can find what they need without having to stop and think too hard, and whether the product feels intuitive rather than like one more thing they have to figure out.

I’m naturally curious about how people view the world. And because of that, I like talking with users, watching how they go through a process, and noticing the small moments where something feels confusing, awkward, or more complicated than it needs to be. Those details are easy to dismiss, but they often make the difference between a product that technically works and one that people really enjoy using.

A lot of the fulfillment I find in my work comes from removing those little points of friction by making the next step feel clear, reducing unnecessary choices and giving people the right feedback at the right moment. Building interfaces that feel intuitive enough that no one has to think about how to do something.

That’s the part of engineering I find most rewarding. Writing code matters, but I’m most excited by the process of taking a messy or difficult problem and shaping it into something that feels simple, approachable, and thoughtfully made.

Working With Me

Great work starts with great people

One of the things I’m most proud of in my career is the relationships I’ve built with the people I’ve worked alongside. I genuinely enjoy collaborating with designers, product managers, researchers, QA engineers, and other developers. I’m naturally curious, quick to ask questions and always interested in hearing how someone else sees a problem. Some of the best solutions come from bringing different perspectives together and being willing to challenge your own assumptions.

I also tend to be the person people come to when they’re stuck, working through a difficult decision or just need an honest opinion. I’m good at stepping back and looking at a problem from several angles, and thinking through the possible paths and outcomes before finding a way forward. I try to be kind but direct, practical and very low drama.

I’m known for staying calm under pressure, being approachable and taking the time to mentor and support the people around me. I care about creating an environment where people feel comfortable sharing ideas, asking questions, admitting when they don’t know something and respectfully disagreeing.

At one former workplace, I was even voted “kindest coworker,” which is still one of the career achievements Im secretly most proud of. I believe being a good teammate is every bit as important as being a good engineer. The work is better when people trust one another, feel supported and know they can bring both their ideas and their problems to the table.

Working with AI

AI is a collaborator, not a total replacement

I see AI as a creative partner, not a replacement for human thought, skill, or judgment. I use it as a place to think out loud, explore possibilities, challenge my assumptions, and move more quickly from an idea to something real. The ideas, direction, and final decisions are always my own, and I believe it’s important to question and verify what AI produces rather than accepting it blindly.

For the way my brain works, though, having a tool that can keep up with the sheer number of ideas I want to explore has been genuinely transformative. It helps me work through problems from different angles, find the words for things I already feel but haven’t quite articulated, and bring ideas to life much faster than I could alone. The best results come from collaboration: bringing your own experience, curiosity, taste, and judgment rather than asking AI to do ALL of the thinking for you.

That being said, I thought it would be both fitting and funny to ask the ChatGPT I’ve spent so much time thinking and chatting with for its honest opinion of me. Here is what it had to say about me:

My professional experience, at a glance

Here you’ll find an overview of my professional experience, technical skills, leadership experience, and the products I’ve helped build throughout my career.

View CV Download CV

Portfolio Projects

Some things I made

While I am able to speak extensively about my experience in various roles, many of the projects I've worked on professionally during my career I am unable to showcase publicly. Here are a few personal projects that I can share instead:

Bloom Onward

A free, gentle way to track a job search. Instead of a spreadsheet full of “REJECTED” rows, every application plants a seed that grows as it moves through recruiter replies, interviews, offers or rejections, which make the plant bloom rather than marking it a failure.

This idea came from my own experience with job searching and the frustration of dealing with spreadsheets and rejection emails.

I wanted to create a more positive and engaging way to track job applications. Something that felt empowering like a garden growing with each application. I wanted to add some fun and whimsy to the otherwise tedious and soul-sucking process of job searching.

The original idea was to create a visual, interactive, and positive experience for tracking job applications. But I ended up making a pretty decent job tracking tool also.

You can log in as a demo user to explore the features:

P: Bl00m-0nw4rd-Dem0

Vue
Vuex
Express
PostgreSQL
CSS

View live project

Preview screenshot of WindFarm, showing its hero section and gentle job-search tracking pitch

Wind Farm Bird Detection & Tracking Dashboard

An ecological monitoring dashboard that tracks bird activity and collision risk around wind turbines: spatial mapping, per-farm analytics, a cross-farm comparison tool, and a species reference encyclopedia.

This started as a simple take-home case study for a job application, built around a single imaginary wind farm's bird-detection data. The prompt was:

"Your primary goal is to create a small tool that lets an analyst explore bird detections on an interactive map and easily see how those events relate to varying environmental and weather conditions"

But I enjoyed working on it enough that I kept building on it well after the interview process ended, scaling up the mock windfarm data and features as I went.

Please note that this example may be slow to load because it is hosted on a free Render instance, but it is fully functional and worth exploring.

Vue
Vuex
Express
PostgreSQL
Docker
Mapbox GL
ApexCharts

View hosted project

Myths and the Voice Workshop App

One of my very best friends is a professional singer (Lindy-Fay Hella of Wardruna fame and her personal project, Lindy-Fay Hella & Dei Farne).

Recently, we began organizing workshops where we explore the intersection of myth, music, and voice. We initially used another platform to manage registrations, but it was expensive, clunky and didn't give us the flexibility we wanted.

So I built a custom app that allows us to manage registrations, send automated emails, provide participants with resources, post class schedules and zoom links, and allows a place for discussion and media sharing before and after the workshops.

The link goes to the workshop website (which I also built). Only members have access to the application itself, but if you want to see the app in action, I can provide a demo.

React
Zustand
CSS
Firebase
Stripe

View project website

Let’s Connect

I’d love to hear from you.

Whether you’re looking for a frontend/product/UX engineer, someone who loves building thoughtful user experiences, or just want to talk about product design, engineering, nature, or interesting ideas I’d love to hear from you.

LinkedIn Email

Thanks for stopping by