It all started when I was gifted a broken IBM 286 at age 10. I hadn't a clue about computers, but I oozed curiosity and desperately wanted an escape from hand-writing my homework. After many days of obsessive tinkering, I found a fix. The first sounds of the fans whir, the floppy drives rattling away, the frugal HDD revving up, and the CRT flicker into life was the symbolic booting of my life-long fixation with tech and the joy of making things work.
Fast forward to today; I'm CTO & co-founder of OnCare – a SaaS platform for the domiciliary care sector.
Prior to OnCare, I had worked for companies big (BBC, Yahoo!) and small (Moo.com, Thread.com) using an eclectic mix of programming languages, frameworks, cultures and people and I feel blessed I get to work in this vibrant industry.
I would summarise myself as a customer-obsessed technologist who stops at nothing to deliver superior quality software.
London, UK
- Rapidly turned a prototype to production quality whilst securing early customers
- Led the development of our complete stack, Django + React on the backend, React Native on the mobile side hosted on AWS
- Implemented serverless webservers and relational database
- Managed the budgeting, hiring, training, upskilling, management and mentoring of the software engineers to bring our product to market and keep customers happy
- Hands-on with running the business including customer service
- Took prototype from 0 customers to over 100 SMBs with thousands of users depending on us to run their businesses
London, UK
- Responsible for stabilizing and maturing the platform for the high-growth e-commerce provider
- Introduced unit testing, end to end automated testing and a continuous deployment process to get new features in front of customers within 10 minutes
- Responsible for hiring and managing developers
- Projects delivered include same-day delivery functionality, product landing pages and general enhancements to their platform
- Frameworks & services used: AngularJS, Karma, NodeJS, SASS, Grunt, Jade, CodeShip, AWS
London, UK
- Delivered a number of presentations, published blog posts, documented best practices
- Hired and managed a number of senior developers
- Lead R&D effort with designers and UX team to inform product development future focus
- Lead engineering development of work on large scale B2B offering that went on to become the biggest revenue-generating project
- Created frontend toolkit (HTML5, CSS3 & jQuery modules) with designers to keep maximum consistency and reusable components
- Proposing and implementing leading-edge tools like TypeScript & Docker
- Created a JavaScript Image Uploader & Library used for making print products
California, USA & London, UK
- Lead developer on the transition of finance.yahoo.com/portfolios from a 10-year-old XML/XSLT stack onto a bespoke PHP MVC platform
- Lead developer of finance.yahoo.com/news which needed to support 10+ languages, improved the design, UX and SEO and made the site capable of handling millions of pageviews per month
- Merged a message board codebase previously forked by many countries into a unified platform and added internationalisation and localisation to reduce future fragmentation
- Improved features on European Yahoo! homepages including the top stories and search modules
London, UK
- Re-developed both timeout.com/film and timeout.com/shop from legacy codebases to modern re-designed, MVC-powered, semantic, SEO-friendly versions
- Added new features and editorial controls throughout the site
- Administered the MySQL database that powered the site
- Mentored junior team members on a range of web development best practices
London, UK
- Modernised Thread's frontend with a React & its associated ecosystem
- Introduced new development and build process
- Created delightful user experiences using exacting design standards, refined animations and rich interactions
- Worked closely with marketing to optimise the sign-up flow, browsing experience and transactional emails
- Most projects were instrumented using multi-variant testing for data-driven development
London, UK
- Led frontend heavy projects including interaction, animation, performance, accessibility
- Steered the team to adopt Kanban as a means to ensure the ambitious project was delivered on time
- Developed a highly interactive SVG chart to represent complex average conditions data
- Worked with an external agency to create an animated page ambience (didn’t go live as any animation was too taxing)
- Improved overall CI strategy and added a custom application performance monitoring suite into Hudson
I created a service to aggregate calendars, weather, news and more to synthesise it in email form every morning so I could start the day better informed.
Personal websites for creators looking for new opportunities.
