AboutHello, I'm Nicho. I've been a software developer for over 10 years. I started out self-taught at 16, then continued my education at Laurentian University, where I earned my Bachelor of Computer Science in 2019. University didn't stop me from starting my career, though.2016 — Co-founder, tech startupIn 2016 I co-founded a tech startup with another student, and we worked on it for two years. I learned a huge range of skills there — Android and iOS development, writing APIs, building databases, and deploying it all on cloud providers (AWS in particular). The business ultimately failed, but it set me on the path to becoming a full-stack developer and an entrepreneur.
2018 — TimeHeroIn 2018 I joined TimeHero, a local startup building a task-management tool that specialized in scheduling work automatically. It was my first time working with a small team of developers, product managers, and designers in a more established environment. I started in the backend, fixing bugs in the Laravel codebase, then worked my way around the stack and eventually got to own my first project: a cross-platform mobile app written in React Native. With my background in mobile development I was comfortable picking it up, and I fell in love with how simple it was to build apps — I quickly brought the mobile app up to par with the web app. I also started taking responsibility for designing the technical implementation of new features.
2019 — Lead Developer, TimeHeroIn 2019 I became the platform's lead developer. I spent much of my time tackling technical debt, including redesigning the core scheduling algorithm that powered the app's key features. It's one of my proudest accomplishments: the improvement translated directly into a better customer experience (measurable in the drop in support requests), lower costs (a more efficient algorithm let us reduce the number of servers we needed to process schedules), and a foundation the scheduling feature could be built on with new capabilities.
2020 — Founder, CritiqIn 2020 I founded a company called Critiq. It was my first time building an entire system end to end — from idea, to technical design, to production. The service gave customers an asynchronous way to send videos, photos, and PDFs to experts and receive feedback in the form of a video. We built a tool that let experts record their camera, voice, media, and annotations directly from their phone and send it back to the customer, and we managed the whole e-commerce side — from taking customer payments to paying out the experts.
2022 — Rapidscreen ServicesIn 2022, TimeHero was acquired by Rapidscreen Services, a company that handled COVID-19 testing logistics — particularly in the film industry — making sure employees who showed up in person were cleared to work. I worked with many organizations to deliver fast solutions tailored to their testing protocols. I ran a small team of developers to build a platform that let organizations define their own internal protocols and processes and automatically keep their associates (employees, students, clients, and so on) compliant — and when they weren't, automatically send them requests for information until they were. Effectively, it was a universal way to define the kinds of processes we had been building by hand for companies' COVID-19 testing.
2024 — KinmetrixIn 2024 I joined Kinmetrix, where I got to work on a physical product: a machine that measures neck strength and provides neck-strengthening exercise routines. I was responsible for the software that interfaced with the device, as well as the platform that tracked the performance of individuals across a team or clinic. I worked directly with an engineering team to help build the product.
2025 — QuickChartIn 2025 I joined QuickChart, a medical-scribe software company that automatically transcribes patient encounters and generates whatever kind of medical note you need, with the goal of saving doctors time on documentation. I helped prepare the mobile release of their software, deployed a standalone transcription service that didn't rely on any third-party APIs, implemented industry-standard continuous-integration workflows, helped the service become SOC 2 compliant, and built a full telehealth platform — including video conferencing and direct outbound phone calling.
2025 — Idealyst (open source)In 2025 I also started my own open-source project, Idealyst. It began as a framework built on React and React Native, offering a suite of abstractions that gave web and mobile apps standard app functionality from a single codebase, aiming for a true "write once, run everywhere" system. I later expanded it into Idealyst Native: a Rust-based app-development framework built on the same cross-platform principles, but taken to the literal extreme — the core framework can be adapted to run truly anywhere by implementing custom backends. It's what this website is built on, along with my portfolio projects.