01 / Introduction
Frontend Engineering · Experience Design · Product Thinking
I’m Nicaela. I design and build software, though a good deal of my work happens before there’s anything to build.
02 / Selected Works
A few projects that began with different problems and took rather different paths.
I built DealTrace, a pattern recognition engine that analyzes sales conversations and compares winning and losing deals to develop a predictive model.
Integrated into Outlook, it uses these insights to assess deal health and recommend responses. As new deals conclude, their outcomes refine the analysis and inform an evolving playbook of winning and losing patterns.
02 / Sophos Builder
Product Discovery / UI/UX Design / Frontend Architecture / 2026
Preparing a sales proposal involves more decisions than the finished presentation suggests.
Sophos Builder brings those decisions into a set of tools for creating different kinds of proposals, selecting products, and assembling supporting materials.
My work involves designing and developing interfaces, making sense of complex requirements, and identifying opportunities beyond the original scope. Some of the features I've proposed have since inspired entirely new features.
03 / Solution Map
Product Discovery / UI/UX Design / Frontend Engineering / 2025
Solution Map helps Sales Engineers explore Sophos products through recommendations tailored to a company's challenges and business needs.
It uses AI to gather company information and match products against those needs, giving Sales Engineers a more informed starting point.
We built and deployed it in about a month. It was one of the quickest deliveries our team had undertaken.
03 / How I Work
A feature request tells you what somebody wants. It doesn’t always tell you what they need.
I’ve found that the most useful work often begins with questions that weren’t in the original requirements.
What is the person actually trying to accomplish? Where does the existing process fail? What happens before and after this particular task? Could we solve more than one problem without making the product harder to use?
I like being involved in those conversations.
I also like the practical work that follows: arranging information, designing interactions, making technical decisions, and getting something useful into people’s hands.
Good software requires both kinds of thinking.
04 / Experience
I’ve been building web applications since 2016, working with teams in the Philippines, Australia, Ireland, UK, and the United States.
My early work involved building websites for clients. Later came larger applications, legacy migrations, frontend architecture, and increasingly complex product workflows.
These days, I spend much of my time working between engineering, design, and product decisions.
2023 to Present
Frontend engineering, UI/UX design, and product development for internal sales engineering tools and enterprise workflows.
Projects include DealTrace, Sophos Builder, Solution Map, Document Studio, and platform integrations.
2021 to 2023
Frontend architecture, application development, interface consistency, and performance improvements across web applications.
2019 to 2021
Modernizing legacy interfaces, developing frontend applications, and improving development practices.
2016 to 2019
Designing and developing web solutions for international clients, from early requirements through implementation and maintenance.
05 / Notes from the underground
I read, watch films, cook, cycle, and occasionally become absorbed in subjects that have nothing to do with development.
I also take notes. Some are useful. Others seemed important at the time.
This is where I’ll keep the ones worth returning to.
06 / Contact
Have a question, a project in mind, or an idea worth talking through? Send me a note. I’d be glad to hear from you.