Career History

Software Engineering Consultant & Tech Lead at Equal Experts November 2020 – present

Working primarily with Wayfair client as an engineering consultant. I provide technical leadership for wide reaching initiatives at this large global company.

As part of a frontend enablement team, I made the framework for a full stack web components distributed with Webpack Module Federation. Introducing module federation and making it simpler for other teams to do the same, was deemed a success. Details of this initiative are on the Wayfair engineering blog, my own blog, and in this conference talk. This was a highly challenging and rewarding endevaour at a company of Wayfair’s scale.

Co-produced the template for new frontend applications for which all new apps adopt.

Engineering lead for adding new supported locales across a large and diverse system architecture, coordinating & advising around 50 teams.

Senior Frontend Engineer at Karmarama March 2020 – November 2020

Senior software engineer on a project for the Ministry of Defence using Gatsby, React and Cypress. As the project is under strict security protocols, I am unable to give much detail.

In essence, the project was a ground-up rebuild with a brand new design using the Jamstack. The site was targeted specifically for people who may have patchy internet connections.

Frontend Development Services at Not on the High Street November 2019 – March 2020

Leading the frontend effort as part of a significant modernisation project. Involves strategy for how & where best to integrate into legacy codebases, deploying services to Amazon ECS infrastructure and a Next.js application.

Technical Lead Services at Financial Times March 2017 – November 2019

Tech lead on the Engagement stream for FT.com. Improving reader journeys for front page, article pages and through personalisation with myFT. Ultimately driving consistency between FT.com properties and native apps.

Building persistent podcast player on FT Apps in React + Redux, interfacing with a native bridge.

Building new video platform as part of migration from third party. NodeJS, React, Elastic Search and Heroku.

Built text-to-speech service using Amazon Polly to provide audio version of all FT articles.

Working with Fastly CDN configuration across multiple high traffic regions.

Technical Architecture at Pension Wise November 2015 – March 2017

Designed helped build online booking system for multi-channel Pension Wise appointments run nationally. This involved building a bespoke product that served resource managers, customers and the specialists running the appointments. A first of its kind within Government. View a product highlight video (password 'triage').

Assisted with design and produced calculators for each pension option.

Lead Front-end Development services at Money Advice Service December 2013 – November 2015

Part of a new team in company-wide agile transformation and responsive rebuild.

Built Dough, an open source & accessibile component library that uses Rails helpers to allow tools to have a consistent design from a single source. It is available on Github. The source for Made With Dough, the documentation and usage for Dough is also built in the open.

Managed relationships, onboarding and reviews of multiple third party agencies.

Worked heavily with accessibility, ensuring all products are at least WCAG2 AA compliant. Technical reviews were carried out by teams with a varied range of access needs, to thoroughly test the experience.

Worked with front-end team to introduce new ways of working, such as building & maintaining Dough, automated Javascript testing, and define a Javascript architecture. AngularJS was trialled thoroughly.

Worked closely with UX team to run user testing sessions for idea validation, by building rapid prototypes and defining & validating behavioural objectives.

Front-end development services for Mozilla / US Ignite April 2014 – May 2014

Build entire front-end in partnership with Django back-end developer. Performed Django integration

For speed and ensuring the code was maintinable, the front-end was built using the latest Zurb Foundation.

Development services at CrowdSurge August 2013 – December 2013

Contract position. As a number of the projects the company is working on have not yet been released, I am unable to provide a lot of detail at this stage.

Helped introduce Agile workflow to the team, acting as scrum master throughout the placement. Assisted with move to git, sandboxes and continuous deployment.

Enhanced the 'integration' embed code that clients use to embed CrowdSurge stores onto their websites. Previously, stores had a fixed height and often saw 'double scrollbars.' Using HTML5 PostMessage and a number of fallback techniques, the store now reports the height it requires (between http, https and in-page updates) to the client website, which resizes the store accordingly.

Presented introductory talks on NodeJS and asynchronous development techniques.

Lead Development / Scrum Master at PhotoBox May 2013 – August 2013

Contract developer brought in to build MVP for new Universal Checkout project.

Built by myself with NodeJS (Express), (S)CSS, and development of service API layer between PhotoBox back-end, checkout and 3rd party payment gateways. Assisted in set up of EC2 hosting environment, using Amazon OpsWorks.

MVP results were positive, team expanded to 7 people. I was positioned as lead developer and scrum master for project ongoing.

Technical Lead / Director at Everywhere July 2012 – May 2013

Ongoing management of technical team, including scoping, pitching and process development. Moved all code to Github and Amazon EC2 with automated build and deployment processes.

Design and development of NFC powered fashion app, built on NodeJS and CouchDB. Developed a public NPM package to automatically generate a version-controlled changes feed for the database. Changes are delivered over a REST API to multiple client technologies; iOS, Android, web. This allowed for offline databases stored on each of the clients, with an easy process for syncing the latest from the server.

Data visualisation build for WPP Agency Added Value, for their brand analysis project Cultural Traction. The visualisation work created by developing a custom library, rendering CSS and SVG for a cross platform experience. Examples for Global VIBE and Vibe By Country are on the live website.

Development of Chloé's 60th Anniversary website, The Chloé Alphabet. Included use of the Box2D physics engine.

End to end development and co-working design process on Nike's 1948London website. The site was a rapid build and completed in around 2 weeks, with a Wordpress powered CMS and responsively built front-end. I was only the developer on the project.

Front-end was built using SASS, with automatic grid generation and responsive repositioning on the article page templates.

Included custom integrations into Instagram [example] and Dropbox APIs. Custom Wordpress plugins were built to allow easy management of this, which I will be submitting to the open source community. The Instagram integration also had a caching algorithm I wrote to limit similar calls to the API.

Web Developer at Potato April 2012 – May 2012

Working on projects under NDA so details are restricted. All projects were for Google client.

Working with Django/Python, Google App Engine and advanced build management tools.

Technical Team Lead & Solutions Architect at R/GA October 2010 – April 2012

Scoping, planning, development lead and integration oversight for several global website builds. Tightly involved in the creative process where possible, working to an iterative design and build process. Organised development team away day with Dr. Sue Black and visit to Bletchley Park.

Technical lead and front-end web developer on Aston Martin global website re-design. Worked with UX and Design teams to produce a standards driven HTML5 based website. Includes the first of its kind with an HTML5 Canvas Car Configurator engine, soon to be optimised for mobile devices. Worked closely alongside ASP.NET server-side development team, preparing and designing front-end code to create a smooth integration process.

Technical lead on BeatsByDre.com during initial site build. Role included client management, scoping, and prototyping with the design team. I also helped manage the third party agency who were responsible for the back-end.

Other clients include BNP Paribas, O2 and Getty Images and many others under NDA.

Spoken at a number of events including a recent Google Doubleclick event in London to promote HTML5 in Advertising.

Web Developer at The Team October 2009 – September 2010

Adobe Flash and AIR development for government organisation, Becta.

Front-end development on NOW! That's What I Call Music website. Also worked on PHP/Drupal back-end.

Front-end development on several widgets for Logica Intranet including advanced Bing Maps API mashup.

Front-end development on complex UI for Cisco Learning Environment including RaphaelJS/SVG powered Avatar Builder.

Prototyping, development and other involvements on BP, Heston Blumenthal's The Fat Duck, Sony Intranet, KPMG iPad web-app and The Team websites.

Web Development Services at Exposure January 2007 – September 2009

Complete development of Tiger Beer UK.

Complete development of Calvin Klein Male Underwear Search with HTML/CSS front-end and ASP.NET back-end.

Flash production and Facebook integration of widgets for Martini Stay Beautiful Campaign.

Web Developer / Company Director at Brushfire Design January 2005 – September 2009

Working as a development agency Brushfire Design, run by myself, with four full time developer employees ranging from ASP.NET, PHP, Flash, HTML and other technologies. Assisted with all Digital work throughout this period.

Clients included Kingley Event Management, Sky Movies, Sky Sports, Hewlett Packard, and others.