Bilal Essakini, front-end developer. Feels good. Holds up.
I build interfaces that feel as good as they look — and hold up in production.
React · Next.js · TypeScript. Production websites for the University of Hertfordshire; now building production data systems at OpenSignal. UK-based, open to remote.
Get in touchDeskivo
Desk booking for hybrid teams.
- The problem
- In hybrid offices people turn up and can’t find a desk, or can’t sit near their team. Admins have no simple way to manage the space.
- What I built
- Users pick a date, see the office on an interactive floor plan and reserve a free desk in a few taps — for a day or a whole week. They can see where teammates have booked and manage everything from My Bookings. Admins run offices, floors and desks from a dashboard and upload their own floor plans.
- My part
- Designed and built end to end: interface, data model, authentication and deployment.
- Next.js
- React
- TypeScript
- Prisma
- PostgreSQL
- Supabase
- NextAuth.js
- Tailwind CSS
- Vercel
navigation
The new main navigation for herts.ac.uk, used by every visitor to the University of Hertfordshire website. Built with the university’s designers and stakeholders, from brief to launch.
40% overall improvement in page load speed and performance.
Measured with Google Lighthouse.
- The problem
- The old navigation looked dated, slowed the site down, and made it hard for prospective students, current students and staff to find what they needed — its labels didn’t say where links went.
- What I built
- Six plain top-level sections. Each opens a full-width menu of links grouped under clear headings, with descriptive labels so people know where they’re going before they click. On mobile, a full-screen menu drills into the same sections.
- Accessibility
- Keyboard and focus: every menu opens, moves and closes without a mouse, and focus returns to its trigger.
- Menus announce expanded and collapsed states, tested with screen readers.
- The result
- Beyond the speed gain: fewer support requests about finding pages, and clearer analytics on how visitors move through the site.
- University CMS
- HTML
- Bootstrap
- Sass
- JavaScript
- jQuery
- Lighthouse
- Google Analytics
Project 03
Cinema booking
Browse showings, pick a seat on the seat map, sign in and check out. Front end and PHP/MySQL back end, built by me.
- PHP
- MySQL
- JavaScript
- HTML
- CSS
- Bootstrap
Experience
Dec 2025 – Present
Data Acquisition Engineer
OpenSignal
Production systems that have to hold up every day: GitLab CI/CD, monitoring and SLA-driven daily data feeds.
Mar 2025 – Nov 2025
Web Developer
University of Hertfordshire
Accessible, performant web apps with React, the university CMS and APIs — including the new site navigation.
Mar 2024 – Feb 2025
Graduate Marketing Executive (Web Developer)
University of Hertfordshire
Responsive landing pages and campaign content with the marketing team, contributing to a 40% uplift in user engagement and a 35% increase in site traffic, and improving WCAG 2.1 compliance by about 20%.
Sept 2020 – July 2023
BSc (Hons) Computer Science
University of Hertfordshire
Software engineering, UX design and web technologies.
Stack
Front end
- TypeScript
- React
- Next.js
- Tailwind CSS
- JavaScript
- HTML
- CSS
- Sass
- Bootstrap
- jQuery
- Framer Motion
Back end and data
- Node.js
- Express
- Prisma
- PostgreSQL
- Supabase
- MySQL
- MongoDB
- PHP
- Python
Tooling, delivery and design
- Git
- GitHub
- GitLab CI/CD
- Vite
- Vercel
- Render
- Google Lighthouse
- Google Analytics
- CMS platforms
- Figma
touch
Hiring for a front-end role, or need a site built properly? Tell me what you’re working on.
Or reach me byemailLinkedIn (opens in a new tab)GitHub (opens in a new tab)