Objective
To deliver web apps and web sites that give a great user experience.
I spent over 15 years working across the stack building websites with functional UIs and a rich set of features. I now head up multiple development teams at Maglabs delivering their enterprise DAM products and application platform.
Skills
Responsibilities & technology
- Team leadership
- HTML5, CSS/SASS/LESS, PHP, MySQL & JavaScript
- Designing and prototyping in Sketch & Figma
- Mobile first & responsive layouts
- Experience building iOS apps with SwiftUI
- Methadologies:
- Scrum / Agile
- TDD (Test Driven Development)
- CI & CD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery)
Experience
Associate Director & Head of Development
Maglabs
July 2022 — present
In July 2022 I was promoted the position of Associate Director, continuing my responsibilities as the Head of Development. In my extended role, I have enjoyed more time with stakeholders and driving the strategy and direction across the business.
As well as supporting the development, QA, infrastructure and design teams, I have helped to drive efficiencies by working closely with product owners and account managers.
Alongside my day-to-day responsibilities I have supported teams in their efforts to drive down costs and deliver better value for money for clients through the solutions we have built for them.
Head of Development
Maglabs
October 2020 - present
Responsible for the Development, UX, QA, and System Admin teams working on a range of products and projects. This includes a scalable business workflow platform used in the media, marketing, content management and retail packaging sectors.
I work closely with the Helpdesk, Account Managers and Product Owners to help prioritise tasks and to improve our processes.
Senior Front End Developer / Architect
Hornbill Service Management Ltd.
February 2020 — September 2020
I took on the responsibility of both the user experience the look and feel for the Hornbill platform and all of it's applications.
This involved creating and managing a comprehensive style guide with working examples. I introduced updated styles that were automatically applied and created semantic HTML components that were easy to understand and implement. I also worked closely with development teams to wireframe UX improvements and built interactive prototypes in Sketch.
Senior Web Applications Developer & Team Lead
Hornbill Service Management Ltd.
October 2014 — January 2020
Returning to Hornbill in a Senior Developer position, I took on responsibility for multiple applications being developed for the Hornbill Application Store in addition to leading the development team on their flagship Service Manager application. The team adopted a Scrumban approach to development allowing them to move faster and I lead them through more than 70 production releases.
I built tools in PHP, ehanced with vanilla JavaScript, to automate processes and provide better insights into the teams performance as well as to help better communicate our roadmap to customers. It also allowed us to give better visibility of our progress within the business. I took the opportunity to gamify our development process which improved the team's attitude towards the release cycle and improved code quality.
I took it upon myself to provide thought leadership for the development team and to prototype ideas. This allowed me to pitch ideas to the wider business and illustrate the pros and cons of particular approaches. In some cases, this involved detailed documentation to map out timescales and concrete plans on how to achieve tasks like migrations or complex features. I was actively involved in architecting, prototyping, developing, maintaining, and incubating a range of new apps.
Actively contributed to public discussions with customers on forums, made on site visits to find out more about how customers use our applications and have given demos of the Hornbill platform and apps at industry trade shows. I've succefully lead development on multiple strategic pushes to unveil new functionality at the annual Hornbill Insights event.
Senior Web Developer
Clever Little Design
May 2014 — September 2014
Introduced new processes which allowed the team to deliver work to customers in a more professional and timely manner. Stopped development on production and introduced the concept of source control. Documentation was standardised with the introduction of an internal wiki and combined with the use of source control, continuous delivery became a reality..
As part of the documentation, I introduced guidelines on how code should be both written and documented and mentored both middleweight and junior developers in PHP, CSS and JavaScript best practice. As part of my role, I worked alongside the CEO and the developers to ensure the company met compliance requirements for larger organizations. This included hardening internal security and auditing the production servers. I worked to implement a backup and disaster recovery solution to allow Clever Little Design to continue operating in a worst case scenario.
Lead Web Developer
Hornbill Service Management Ltd.
February 2012 — May 2014
As the first developer to join the Service Manager project, I drove the company's adoption of Scrum for application development teams and worked closely with both the product owner and chief architect of the project to define requirements that covered the first phase of the product. This laid the foundations of their next generation ITSM solution. My first project was to lead the development of a prototype app for the previous-generation project that bought a mobile-first experience for the first time.
In my role as ScrumMaster I helped to scope the initial delivery project and we became the first team in 6 years of development of the entire platform to deliver a product to a timescale and on the agreed date.
I was heavily involved in the company's efforts to recruit new developers across the business, conducting face-to-face, telephone, practical and technical interviews with candidates for both junior and senior positions.
Software Engineer & Web Developer
Sky
August 2008 — February 2012
Initially my responsibility was to scope, develop and deliver content managed sites for various channels and programmes on Sky. The role evolved to begin delivering customer facing applications and services with critical business value. I evaluated various PHP MVC frameworks to use for each project and worked closely with a number of stakeholders, teams and third parties. The success of these projects meant the team became one that delivered web applications rather than web sites.
Disaster recovery becoming an important issue for the company, I took the lead on efforts to ensure all of our properties could be deployed using a continuous integration approach to multiple locations so that in the event of a DOS attack, we could fall over gracefully. I worked closely with system administrators, database managers and product owners while coordinating changes with the rest of the team. I also took responsibility for migrating legacy websites for companies that were acquired by Sky and making sure they were also part of our CI process to make updating and deployment easier.
I was the lead developer on a bespoke CI/CD tool the team used to deploy all of their code and took an active role in recruitment at Sky, particular as part of their graduate programme.
Front-end Web Developer
XM London
November 2007 — August 2008
Working with a bespoke .NET CMS built by XM London, I worked closely with account managers, designers and the QA to deliver high quality front-ends. Accessibility was a key consideration, especially when working with both Royal entities and government agencies. Many projects also required the ability to work with right-to-left languages and I helped to maintain legacy websites and worked with teams that were located across the globe to deliver HTML pages that were used as wrappers for apps built in Flash or Silverlight.
Web Developer
Monkeehouse Ltd.
January 2006 — October 2007
Originally responsible for the front-end development of websites, I quickly graduated to a full-stack role where I also took on responsibility for building bespoke content management systems. I worked with CSS and JavaScript (Prototype.js, Scriptaculous, and jQuery) to progressively enhance pages.
For a variety of projects, I also worked with Flash on multiple projects to build really exciting presentations or user interfaces.
Junior Web Assistant
Newsquest Ltd.
July 2005 — December 2005
I was originally responsible for the maintenance and reporting of over 15 websites before my role evolved to also include managing online advertising and banner ad creation for clients.
Portfolio
Professional & Commercial
Below is a small selection of the companies and brands I have worked for as either a front or back end developer. For all of the below, I have had a direct impact on customer and consumer facing aspects of public and internal facing websites:
- Larch by Maglabs
- Stratum application platform
- Sargasso by Maglabs
- Hornbill Collaboration
- Hornbill Service Manager
- Hornbill Project Manager app
- Hornbill internal tools/apps
- Sky Arts
- The Cloud — by Sky
- Sky News International
- Sky Sports Living for Sport
- BSkyB Pensions
- Sky Money, Sky Travel & Sky Shopping
- Sky Retail Gateway
- Free Postcode Maps
- Aylesbury College
- Maharishi & DPMhi
- Unpackaged
- Morgan Lockyer
- Dan Tobin Smith
- Walker Bushe Associates
- NG Kids UK
- Signposter.com
- Evian
- GCHQ microsite
- Leader of the House of Commons
- SaBRE
- Platinum Guild International
- USwitch
- Go Ahead
- Elsevier
- Harvey Nichols
- Staggerin
- Heston Community School
- West Drayton Explorers FC
- OneClick Photography
- Sports Alliance
- Amstrad.com
- Amsurf/Amserve
- The Great British Bake Off
Personal projects
As well as a full-time role, I have also worked on a few of my own projects, using them as a platform to learn new techniques and to solve problems I have encountered. The most recent are listed below.
Working with SwiftUI I have begun protoyping in code and building native iOS apps.
Code samples
& presence in the developer community
Education
BSc in Media Technology
Kingston University
2002 - 2005
Achieved a 2.1 in Media Technology where I worked on a range of web, film, photo, electronic, and mathematical projects. For web based projects I specialised in user interface design and interactions.
My work gained an honourable mention at the SIGGRAPH student competition in 2004.
A2 & AS Levels
Heston Community School
1995 - 2002
- 9 A* - C grade GCSEs
- AS levels in Physics, Mathematics (mechanics), IT, & Graphics
- A2 levels in Mathematics, IT, & Graphics.
References
A full list of references is available on request.