I'm Nick Vander Kolk. I cover the whole stack, design system to database to deploy pipeline, so teammates never wait on a handoff. Ten years shipping customer-facing software in close partnership with product, design, and the people who use it. A build for 100M+ people with no legacy constraints is exactly what I've been training for.
Range isn't about working solo. It's about never being the bottleneck, and building the tools that make everyone around you faster. Receipts included.
At Vector Remote Care I replaced a fragile manual intake with a complete product: realtime queue UI with live multi-user presence, an email-ingestion microservice, and the AWS infrastructure under it, shaped by working directly with the support and clinical teams who live in it. Clinics now forward an email and it just works.
Founding engineer on two platforms built from nothing, hitting millions in ARR in year one. On a team small enough to fit in a booth, I carried the frontend architecture and the product roadmap at the same time, in lockstep with design.
Took Breakout Learning's real-time platform from tens of concurrent classes to thousands without the experience degrading, and shipped AI-powered insights into the core product while doing it.
I built my org's AI engineering toolchain: shared Claude Code skills, autonomous bug triage, UAT automation. Agents and humans ship through the same pipeline, and the whole team moves faster because of it. That's what AI-first means to me: not a feature, an operating system for how we work.
Nobody can name great engineering. They just feel it: nothing stutters, nothing lies, nothing loses their place. Here's what that feels like across products I've shipped:
Breakout Learning went from tens of concurrent live classes to thousands. Class number 1,000 felt exactly like class number 10.
Profiled and tuned the live layer so sessions never stutter mid-class, even at 100x the original load.
Built Coleader and Sidekick's entire frontend from scratch. Two products, one system, zero rewrites as they grew.
Thousands of teams subscribed in year one, millions in ARR. When quality is the default, it becomes the marketing.
Atomic presence and a rebuilt cache layer mean a status badge is never wrong and data is never stale.
One file. No spinners, no layout shift, no tracking, reduced motion respected. View source, it's part of the pitch.
That's the whole philosophy: polish isn't a phase at the end, it's the default state. The best version possible, or it doesn't ship.
Hand me a slice of the membership frontend and a deadline. If the bar is "the best version possible or it doesn't ship," we already share a religion.
// longtime fan of the craft · built for day zero