Colin Kautz

A brief introduction...

10+ years of professional development experience.
Primarily focuses on Front End, with experience working across the full stack.
Strong partner across engineering, design, and product functions.
Excited to discuss web development, share ideas, and turn new findings into cool projects.

Brands I have worked with

Projects I'm Proud Of

Caleres, Inc. 2017-2025

Experienced Based Commerce

Taking on the challenge of replatforming over a dozen enterprise eCommerce sites simultaneously...

About a year after starting at Caleres, I joined the Front-End team. The websites, including Famous Footwear, Sam Edelman, Naturalizer, and more, were hosted on a bespoke CMS platform that wasn't flexible for marketing teams to interact with and update various aspects of the site, such as site content, product descriptions, or user experiences.

I collaborated with several developers on a major platform migration, moving our sites to Sitecore (an enterprise eCommerce and CMS solution) and integrating additional brands into the new system.

In the beginning, we leveraged JavaScript, SCSS, C#, and Node.js to build out new features, components, and customizations. We also implemented a design language system, powered by each brand's Figma documents, to ensure unique branding for each site while maintaining core functionality from the platform.

Towards the end of my time on the project, we began modernizing our approach by adopting TypeScript and React for new components and enhancements, along with CSS variables and CSS modules. This provided greater flexibility in building features and improved modularity and reusability for potential future platform migrations.

The new platform has been a major success; Caleres has increased conversion rates and overall customer purchase satisfaction since the sites fully launched in 2021.

Here are some examples of the live sites:

Famous Footwear Allen Edmonds Sam Edelman All Brands

2025

Tree Shaker

Creating a Twitch-integrated video game through months of live development streams.

After a couple years away from streaming, I joined Twitch's Software and Game Development community in January 2025, inspired by watching other notable streamers in the space. I always found coding personal projects enjoyable, and I wanted to share that passion with others.

I initially started with smaller one-off projects, but soon found myself wanting a bigger challenge. Having never made a game before, I decided to learn the basics while applying my coding skills to a larger project, which led to the creation of Tree Shaker.

I utilized SvelteKit as the front-end framework, within which I created a landing page, a profile page for logged-in users, and the game page itself. For authentication with Twitch, I leveraged the Better Auth library. I used Supabase for the game database and integrated Twitch's APIs so viewers could redeem channel points for additional turns. All of the game assets and the website are hosted through Vercel.

Developing all of this took around seven months. What started as a learning experiment became a fully-featured game with an engaged community of players and viewers.

Tree Shaker site