About me

Patrick Nærvig WøhlkI'm a Digital Product Engineer with 11+ years at The LEGO Group - a product engineer at heart who turns fuzzy ideas into things people actually use, and who genuinely enjoys helping the people
around me do their best work. I value pragmatic, fact-based solutions, and I'm just as happy deep in a CI/CD pipeline as I am sketching a new product concept.

Experience

Jan 2023 - Present

Senior Engineer

The LEGO Group · LEGO Play

Currently contributing to the LEGO Play app - delivering marketing & campaign features through our home-grown block-based CMS, owning A/B testing for the kids apps, and keeping us honest on data & product privacy. Previously contributed, on Creative Experiences, I prototyped and user-tested canvas-based play experiences with Skia - Comic Books, Game Maker, Mosaic and Avatar Studio - and drove our GitLab → GitHub migration.
React Native · TypeScript · Node / tRPC · AWS

Feb 2022 - Jan 2023

Lead Engineer

The LEGO Group · Klik (now Connect)

looked after Klik - our design system and component library used by 30+ product teams - gathering feedback, running inner-sourcing, and (with no competency lead at the time) interviewing and hiring engineers. Sketched the early drafts of what became “Connect” and set up the CDN serving fonts & icons across most of LEGO.com.
React · Pulumi · TypeScript · Web Components

Jul 2019 - Feb 2022

Senior Engineer

The LEGO Group · Family Hub & LEGO Account

On Family Hub I set our ways of working, championed accessibility, and re-architected the external proof-of-concept from Vue to React onto LEGO's paved path. On LEGO Account I mentored juniors and interns and tuned user flows to lift sign-ups and conversion - with a couple of side hustles, including an “ecosystem profile” POC and the first Duck Builder for the LEGO Foundation.
React · TypeScript · Node · OpenID

Nov 2014 - Jul 2019

Engineer

The LEGO Group

Where it all started. From the account-creation flows behind LEGO Account 3.0 (and LEGO Life's playful sign-up), to internal tools in UX Mobility & Portals, to an in-house traceability platform for our retail integrations - and an augmented-reality HoloLens POC that surfaced machine temperature and pressure on the manufacturing floor.
C# · JavaScript · TypeScript

Education

2011 - 2016

AP Degree, Computer Science

ZBC - Zealand Business College

Off the clock

2019 - Present

Trooper, 501st Legion

Bad guys doing good. I suit up with the 501st to visit children's hospitals and create a bit of joy where it's needed most.

Ongoing

Homelab & infrastructure

Self-hosted

A multi-node Proxmox cluster with high availability and failover, a healthy pile of Docker containers, and plenty of infrastructure-automation tinkering. Currently teaching myself Ansible for provisioning.

Selected work

LEGO Play app

LEGO Play

2023 - Present

On Creative Experiences, what stood out was the loop - engineers, designers and user researchers shipping together, testing with real kids, then iterating. We got Skia talking to our canvas (the first real breakthrough - it replaced LEGO Life's old sticker-and-effects flow) and built a handful of creative tools on top of it: Mosaic, Avatar Studio and more. On the App Platform side now, I'm focused on the architectural patterns we're setting for what comes next.

React Native TypeScript Skia Canvas AWS
Klik / Connect design system

Klik → Connect

2022 - 2023

Klik was LEGO's design system and component library, used across 30+ product teams. The hard part wasn't leading the team so much as the call before that: what belongs in the system, what fidelity a v1 ships at, and the politics of getting a component in when every team has a slightly different need. With no competency lead at the time I also stepped in on hiring - and seeing those colleagues now thriving across LEGO is the part that still gives me energy. The thing I most enjoyed shipping was a shared CDN for fonts & icons that replaced per-team hosting across most of LEGO.com - one endpoint, a lot fewer repeated client downloads. Along the way I sketched the early drafts of what became “Connect.”

React Web Components Pulumi TypeScript Design Systems
LEGO Family Hub

Family Hub

2019 - 2022

Family Hub was LEGO's family-facing site - play activities, building guides, playful digital parenting; LEGO as a tool for play within the family. The original proof-of-concept had been built by an external team in Romania, who'd been sold on Vue just as the org was settling on React as its paved path - so a lot of my work was re-architecting onto that path while helping the external team understand what “paved path” meant inside the LEGO Group. The mandate I cared about most was accessibility: build it so nobody feels left out.

React TypeScript a11y Node Architecture
LEGO Account - identity for kids and adults

LEGO Account 3.0

2018 - 2022

LEGO Account is the identity layer the whole ecosystem signs in through. For the 3.0 rebuild I worked primarily on the signup and login experience - React with Redux - and the genuinely hard part wasn't the auth, it was the partners. One shared account system served very different consumers, and each wanted sign-up to feel like theirs: the LEGO Life app, in particular, needed a fun, kid-friendly flow that still rode the same identity backbone as everything else. Later I worked with analytics & UX to tune those flows for signup and conversion.

React Redux OpenID Node Identity
Homelab - Proxmox cluster

Homelab

Ongoing

My playground - where I learn by doing and most of my hobby projects live. Right now I'm deep in CephFS and high-availability clustering on Proxmox, and I run self-hosted alternatives to Google Drive and Photos so my family's data stays ours. Storage is 100 TB+ on ZFS via TrueNAS Scale. Next on the bench: retiring my Active Directory domain in favour of Authentik with an LDAP outpost. It's where I prototype, break things on purpose, and host a corner of my own internet.

Proxmox CephFS ZFS / TrueNAS Authentik HA / Failover