Toronto · front-end developer · open to roles

Richard Robinson

I build the bridge between experience and interface — the components, the integrations, the things that ship seamlessly..

Depth Angular · TypeScript · RxJSAlso React · Next.js · NodeSpecialism AODA / WCAG 2.1 AA

Selected work — three, not nine

2025 — ongoing

InvestorLine 2.0

Whether you'd like to make your own investment choices, invest with advice, or have your portfolio managed for you, there's an online option to help you make progress toward your investing goals.

Role: UI Developer - Bank of Montreal
Stack: AngularTypeScriptIonicHTML5SCSSWCAG 2.1 AA

Context

An oudated client interface, a new design system, and a new way to approach investment management. The team was small and the timeline was tight.

Approach

Piece by piece, the team rebuilt the project with a focus on what mattered most through a modern experience. I built several of the most complex screens and implemented accessibility from the start.

Trade-off

As the changes were so vast, the team had to prioritize what could be done in the time available and rolled out features incrementally.

What I'd do differently: I would split the teams priorities into halves of larger features and smaller features to ensure that even the 'little things' were being completed and not left to the end of the project.

2019 - ongoing

Mad Movies

A platform for everything film, based off the original Mad Movies college project. The site is a hub for film buffs to discover, rate, and grow their love of cinema.

Role: Sole Developer
Stack: Next.jsTypeScriptSQLPrismaCI/CD

Context

Three date pickers, three modal implementations, three definitions of "primary button." Every design change cost three tickets.

Approach

Built accessibility and theming into the primitives so adopting the library was strictly easier than maintaining a fork. Shipped codemods for the mechanical parts of migration.

Trade-off

I versioned aggressively and broke APIs twice in six months. Painful, but it kept the library from calcifying around early mistakes.

What I'd do differently: I wrote the docs last. Adoption stalled for a month purely because nobody could tell what existed.

2021 - 2023

Onboarding Flow

Investment accounts for every investor, for every financial plan. Explore registered, non-registered, locked-in and corporate investment accounts and discover the best that BMO has to offer.

Role: UI Developer - Bank of Montreal
Stack: AngularTypeScriptHTML5SCSS

Context

Every page was a full server round trip with a 900KB JavaScript bundle on top. Mobile users on 4G were abandoning before first paint.

Approach

Static generation for catalogue pages, streaming for search, and a route-level bundle audit that cut third-party scripts from eleven to three.

Trade-off

Killing eight marketing scripts meant losing some analytics granularity. I made the case with revenue numbers rather than performance numbers, which is what got it approved.

What I'd do differently: I measured LCP but not INP. The interaction latency issues surfaced two months later and needed a second pass.

Experience

2025 — present

UI Developer (contract) - Bank of Montreal

Shipped a self-serve DRIP enrollment path for InvestorLine — a new modal flow and primary CTA replacing a process that previously required clients to call in — with entitlement checks suppressing the prompt for already-enrolled clients. 7,014 enrollments in the pilot's first release.
Led front-end overhauls of investment tables, navigation, and order workflows on InvestorLine, modernizing legacy views into reusable Angular components used by retail clients across Canada.
Adopted Figma Code Connect and contributed reusable components to a bank-wide design system, improving delivery speed and UI consistency across teams.

2024 — 2025

Digital Solutions Coordinator - ParticipACTION

Rebuilt ParticipACTION's public website against a new agency-delivered design system as one of two developers, translating brand guidelines and mockups into production templates and components.
Managed site and campaign content for national physical-activity programs reaching 12M+ Canadians, including the 2024 Community Challenge (591,000 participants across 6,255 events).

2024

Front-End Developer - Equitary (early-stage AI startup)

Sole front-end developer on an 8-person team building an LLM-driven due diligence platform for private capital investors; owned the entire client-side codebase in Next.js and React, deployed on Vercel.
Launched the product's public site and authenticated experience end to end — landing, about, and contact pages plus account creation and login — against a PostgreSQL and AWS backend with CI/CD deploys.

2021 — 2023

UI Developer (contract) - Bank of Montreal

Cut abandoned applications by 60% with a timed "stale application" nudge and resumable progress — persisting only non-sensitive fields so clients could return to a partial application rather than restart.
Rebuilt account-opening onboarding in Angular and TypeScript, restructuring an unguided application that took clients close to an hour into a guided flow completed in about twenty minutes.
Partnered with QA, third-party vendors, and back-end teams to streamline integrations, reducing annual maintenance costs by $50,000+.

2021 — 2023

Web Developer - CANSA Centre for Community and Cultural Development

Developed a WordPress platform with custom JavaScript and PHP tooling, delivering educational resources and support services to 1,000+ children and families.

2019 — 2021

Web Developer → Lead Web Developer & Designer - Durham Tax Help

Designed and delivered a scheduling and client-information system serving 2,000+ seasonal clients.

Education & Volunteer Experience

2017 - 2019

Contemporary Web Design - Durham College

Diploma in Contemporary Web Design, including HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, and PHP. Graduated with a 3.9 GPA.

2021 — 2022

Web Developer - CANSA Center & Vidya Publishing

Continued developing and optimizing code bases and custom WordPress plugins to ensure education would remain easily accessible.

About

I care about the interfaces nobody photographs .

Most of my best work started by noticing something everyone had quietly agreed to tolerate — a neglected feature, a misbehaving experience, an inconsistent interface — and fixing it.

Accessibility is the thread through all of it. Not as a compliance checkbox, but because the constraints of building for a screen reader tend to produce better structure for everyone.

Half of what I do is code; the other half is the conversation that made the code obvious. I'm happiest on a small team with real ownership.

Contact

Let's build something durable .

If you're hiring — or you just want to argue about design systems, accessibility, or emerging technologies — I'd like to hear from you.

richard@isaiahrobinson.ca