# Izhan Danish (Injaste)

> Izhan Danish, who goes by Danish, is a Singapore-based Lead Technologist at Hei by TOPPAN NEXT and a self-taught full-stack engineer who has been developing for 7+ years. Danish owns technical delivery end to end across concurrent client projects, builds front ends, apps and AI chatbots across the TOPPAN NEXT Group, and builds Hitchy Stitchy, an all-in-one planning platform for weddings and other celebrations, on React and Supabase.

This is a plain-text profile of Danish for language models and other tools. It covers the same ground as https://injaste.com and Danish's résumé, in more detail.

## Summary

- Lead Technologist at Hei by TOPPAN NEXT, promoted twice: from Creative Frontend Developer to Technologist to Lead Technologist.
- Trusted early to run projects independently and take them live solo. The scope grew quickly because Danish learns and builds fast, well before AI tools were part of the workflow.
- Every project goes through Danish first. Builds quick prototypes to test feasibility and catch issues early, before the team commits.
- Owns delivery end to end: picks the architecture and frameworks, builds, and takes projects live, across several client projects at the same time.
- Has completed 47 projects and worked with 56 clients.
- The team's go-to on how to build something and whether it can be done, for teammates and interns alike. Guides the team by suggesting solutions, and better ones where they exist. Known for speed and quality; when Danish says something is possible, colleagues trust that over what they find online.
- First on the team to build its internal tools, including the deployment platform now used across 10+ projects. Known for the depth of the animation detail, and directly commended by teammates and project managers.
- AI work: across the TOPPAN NEXT Group, builds the front ends of internal and public-facing AI chatbots, with streaming responses and generative UI that turns answers into cards, charts, graphs, images and stats. Writes and tunes their system prompts and guardrails, consults on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG): what goes into the knowledge base, how it stays current, how answers are checked, and how to keep them accurate without slowing them down. Also advises on requirements and what AI can and can't do.
- Rolled out AI-assisted development across the team with shared rules, speeding up development and improving the team's day-to-day quality of life.
- Hires and supervises developer interns, and has led 4 so far.
- Builds products outside work: Hitchy Stitchy (all-in-one celebration planning platform in beta, 1,000+ guest RSVPs) and Budget Nugget (a private couples finance app), among 13 personal apps and tools built so far.
- Strong in both interactive front end (GSAP, Three.js / WebGL, Motion, Lottie) and real-time full-stack apps (Supabase Realtime, WebSockets), secured with Postgres row-level security.
- Self-taught and developing for 7+ years. Based in Singapore.
- "Injaste" is a word Danish kept saying as a child. It stuck, and it is now Danish's domain and GitHub handle.

## Experience at Hei by TOPPAN NEXT

### Lead Technologist

- Owns end-to-end technical delivery across concurrent client projects: architecture, framework choice, build and go-live.
- Leads client-facing technical discussions: turns business goals into technical solutions, assesses feasibility, and contributes to costing and effort estimates.
- AI chatbots across the TOPPAN NEXT Group, both internal and public-facing: Danish builds the Next.js front ends, with streaming responses and generative UI that renders answers as cards, graphs, charts, images and stats; writes and tunes the system prompts with customised guardrails; consults on RAG (what goes into the knowledge base, keeping it current, checking answers, balancing accuracy with speed); and advises on requirements and on what AI can and cannot do.
- Rolled out a team-wide AI-assisted development workflow, with shared AI rules for Pug mixins, GSAP animation patterns and project structure so generated code follows team standards. It speeds up development and improves the team's day-to-day quality of life.
- Built the team's internal deployment platform, now used across 10+ projects: one central, secure place to deploy any project, with protected pre-release sites, secrets that are stored once and never handled again, and preflight checks before every go-live.
- Built interactive web games for Thermo Fisher Scientific in Three.js.
- Hires and supervises developer interns (4 so far), reviewing and approving their work before release.

### Technologist

- Owned project codebases end to end and advised clients on technical approach and feasibility.
- Modernised the team boilerplate: introduced Pug variables and mixins for reuse and upgraded the full dependency stack.
- Set up CI/CD pipelines for automated deployments across environments.
- Managed servers across cPanel, Kinsta and AWS, including migrations and infrastructure troubleshooting.

### Creative Frontend Developer

- Built websites and apps for the entire group and its subsidiaries: highly animated, interaction-rich sites with GSAP, Motion and Lottie, on Pug and headless CMSs (WordPress, Payload CMS).
- Built the ByteDance Event Portal, Danish's first solo project; single-handedly built the Nexus International School 360° virtual campus tour and helped develop the school's website; built the TOPPAN Digital Language front end and set up its CMS; built the front ends for many Singapore Institute of Technology projects (details under Client projects).

## Own products

### Hitchy Stitchy (https://hitchystitchy.com/, in beta)

An all-in-one planning platform for anyone organising a celebration: weddings, engagements and celebratory events of any kind. Built solo by Danish as a progressive web app (PWA) that installs on a phone like an app. 1,000+ guests have already RSVPed through it.

- **Event timeline:** plan the full run of the event, from pre-event itineraries to the minute-by-minute flow on the day. Private to the organising team, with push notifications when it changes.
- **Team and roles:** invite anyone to help run the event. Admins can do everything; members get access to a set of features.
- **RSVP websites:** every event gets its own custom RSVP website, tailored to what the organisers ask for.
- **RSVP form:** name, phone number, number of guests (pax) and a message by default; organisers add or remove fields.
- **Guest management:** guest groups, tables and seating, guest list imports, and check-in on the day.
- **Gifts:** record who gave what, including cash gifts, and track thank-yous.
- **Budget:** planned versus actual spending, with payment due dates.
- **Vendors:** vendor contacts, contracts and payments in one place.
- **Real time:** everything syncs live across the team with Supabase Realtime, protected by row-level security; push notifications are sent from a Supabase Edge Function.
- Stack: React, Supabase (PostgreSQL, Realtime, Edge Functions, RLS), PWA, Web Push.

### Budget Nugget (private)

- A personal finance app for couples: budgeting, shared expense visibility, and spending analytics from bank statement data.
- Private and for personal use, not publicly available.
- Stack: React, Supabase (PostgreSQL).

## Client projects

- [TOPPAN Digital Language](https://toppandigital.com/): Danish's largest website to date, with nearly 50 pages in five languages (English, Simplified Chinese, Italian, French, Spanish) on WordPress. Danish built the entire front end, set up the CMS with Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) for the content model and WPML for the translations, and contributed to the backend. Its liquid, gooey shape morphing is hand-written in SVG and heavily optimised to balance the gooey stickiness against animation performance.
- ByteDance Event Portal (internal, no public link): Danish's first solo project, and one of the hardest. A secure event-registration portal for ByteDance employees and their family members, built as custom code running inside ByteDance's own React-based low-code platform, used on desktop and mobile within ByteDance's internal ecosystem, with events per location and country, each with its own days and timeslots. The hard part was real-time capacity logic: tracking spots left in each timeslot, promoting people from the waitlist and counting family members towards each limit as people sign up, all within ByteDance's performance checks.
- [Nexus International School](https://www.nexus.edu.sg/virtual-tour/): Danish helped develop the school's website and single-handedly built its WebGL 360° virtual campus tour in Three.js, with hotspots, dynamic scene transitions and location-based navigation.
- [Singapore Institute of Technology](https://www.singaporetech.edu.sg/openhouse/): many projects for teams across the university, including Open House, Career Nexus and Charity Golf, on Drupal and plain HTML. Danish built the mobile-first front ends and designed the Drupal content fields.
- Thermo Fisher Scientific: interactive web games built in Three.js.

## Where it started

- It started with Tap Titans 2, a mobile game that exports raid data as CSVs. For a 50-player clan with about 5 people helping to run it, Danish built algorithms in Google Sheets to analyse player stats, then a Node.js Discord bot that automated insights and events, then a custom full-stack platform that monitored and visualised raid analytics and managed clan data in real time. Internships followed, while Danish kept building and improving tools for the game.

## Skills

- Languages: TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, SQL, C#
- AI: AI chatbot front ends (streaming responses, generative UI), system prompts and guardrails, RAG consulting and knowledge-base setup, AI solution scoping and feasibility, AI-assisted development workflows
- Frontend: React, Next.js, Angular, RxJS, Pug, GSAP, Motion, Three.js / WebGL, Lottie, Tailwind CSS
- Backend and data: Node.js, Express, Supabase (PostgreSQL, Realtime, Edge Functions, RLS), Firebase, MongoDB, MySQL, LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), REST, WebSockets
- DevOps: CI/CD pipelines across environments (GitLab CI/CD), Docker, AWS (EC2, S3), Cloudflare, Linux servers (including Bitnami stacks), Kinsta, cPanel, Git, server management and migrations, internal deployment platform
- CMS: WordPress (ACF, WPML), Drupal (front ends and content fields), Payload CMS

## Links

Danish is happy to hear from people about AI products, front-end and full-stack work, and interesting projects. Email or LinkedIn is the best way to reach out.

- [Website](https://injaste.com/)
- [Résumé](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Rbv3ugkmRTo8ar5v5yjs-wJNW_nV_nF4/view)
- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/izhan-danish/)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/Injaste)
- [Hitchy Stitchy](https://hitchystitchy.com/)
- [Email](mailto:danishraffik@gmail.com)