Nikolaus Brunner
Senior Design Engineer
Personal spec sheet
01Ident
- Name
- Nikolaus Brunner, Nik for short
- Role
- Senior Design Engineer
- Base
- Landshut, Bavaria, DE
- Born
- 1984
- Career
- Self-taught 2019, professional since 2020
- Languages
- German (native), English (fluent)
- nik@nbr.haus
- CV
- This page. It prints as one.
- Listen
Fig. 01The specimenPencil sketch
02About
Before code I worked in audio, first in post-production and then for five years on event technology in Munich hotels. On the side I shot portraits and weddings. In 2019 I switched to code.
I started out on plain frontend work. That's still the core of it, but now I also work on the frontend architecture and the design systems, and a lot of the design itself sits with me.
I'm not a designer by trade. I know my way around Figma, but I never had the time or the need to go deep. That part of the job has grown, and right now I use Claude Design for it, which works well so far. I still like working closely with designers, and I care about UX as much as DX.
I really like building products, and I like using them too. I'm the one who writes to support when I find a bug, and I read changelogs and release notes because I enjoy it.
Away from the desk I go hiking, running and bouldering, and I cook, read and take photos. I'm interested in design in every form, from architecture to typography. And I'm a bit obsessed with keyboards.
03Work
I'm building @imfusion/web-ui, ImFusion's React component library on top of Base UI, with its design tokens, icons and tooling. It's written in TypeScript and tested with Vitest and Playwright. Storybook is its documentation, including the user guides and the changelog.
The library is built to be set up and used through a coding agent. A hook sends UI work to a router skill, which hands it to the skill that fits and loads only the knowledge that skill needs. Evals run agents against consumer scenarios to check they land in the right skill and follow the conventions.
03.1Before
2026-01
Electron app used by hundreds of bike retailers. Maintained a from scratch written component library and built a color system from scratch, moved the main application to TanStack Query and Redux Toolkit. For a sister project I built a storefront on TanStack Start. 2 years in I also mentored juniors.
2020-09
E-commerce platform and an internal social app. React, GraphQL, SCSS.
2020-02
04Projects
04.1Pinned
04.2Log
05How I work
I set my own priorities and manage my own work, and I know when to reach out for input.
Workflow matters a little to me. My dots repo has over 3,500 commits since June 2025. Almost everything I do runs through the terminal and the keyboard, and I keep tuning that setup the way other people tune a bike.
05.1Agents
Claude Code came out in February 2025, in my birthday week. I had the week off and barely left the desk. It was my second wow moment after ChatGPT: I saw where coding was going, and I accepted it.
I build my own agent tooling, for my workflow and for the people using my libraries. I stay the reviewer: agents propose, I read every diff.
I think juniors should still learn to code without LLMs first, the way I did.