Introduction 👋🏻
I've worked across a number of industries including telecoms, education and energy management and am always keen to bring my experience to new industries and business types.
My ability to blend technical knowledge with business acumen allows me to develop intelligent and sustainable solutions that deliver business value, increase productivity and reduce costs.
I work well in teams, whether coaching, collaborating or leading and understand the importance of stakeholder engagement, communication and planning.
Skills
Technologies
PHP
SQL
No SQL
HTML 5
CSS 3
JavaScript
Git
AWS
Azure
Headless CMS
Stripe
Preferred stack
Laravel
Livewire
Alpine.js
Tailwind CSS
Top Tools
Forge
Herd
Docker
VS Code
Pest
Sentry
Oh Dear
Backend
Frontend
General
Strengths
- Good time management – naturally task and goal oriented
- Attention to detail – but progress before perfection
- Creative thinker – can think outside the box and motivated by solving problems
- Strive for simplicity – rather than overengineered solutions
- Clear communicator – good at bridging technical with other parts of the business
- Quick learner – after years of adapting to client needs and new technologies
- Sense of humour – because life is all about balance!
Experience
I have been self-employed since 2006 and have detailed my most significant roles below.
ista Energy Solutions
One of the world’s leading energy service companies helping to create greater efficiency in buildings.
Role
Full-stack web developer – working to uplift "MinuteView" application.
Time
2.5 years
Achievements
- Migrated from legacy PHP MVC to latest Laravel and PHP with staged releases
- Security patched remaining legacy code following 3rd party security audit
- Implemented semantic versioning and release notes to better communicate changes to customers and stakeholders
- Replaced all monolithic jQuery features with Alpine.js components
- Progressively uplifted the UI with Tailwind CSS
- Brought in Livewire for new features – a big win for productivity in a small team
- Translated into 9 languages including date/number localisation
- Set up multiple translation pipelines to harness open source packages and a network of translators
- Implemented automated testing
- Documented key parts of the application for onboarding internal team members
Spotlight
By creating a scoped version of Tailwind preflight, I was able to use Tailwind alongside legacy stylesheets. This not only allowed me to use a common header and footer across the whole app, but also use Tailwind to uplift key legacy views until it was time to replace them. Taking this approach allowed us to uplift the application in multiple stages without disrupting the user experience too much.
The Open University
The UK's largest academic institution and a world pioneer in distance learning.
Role
Full-stack web developer – working across a number of student digital services.
Time
8 years
Achievements
- Led the technical strategy and roadmap to meet both short and medium term objectives
- Liased with stakeholders to understand a range of priorities, expectations and requirements
- Developed a range of digital experiences to help and support students throughout their study
- Developed a unified data layer to enable personalised experiences for students
- Developed a reusable form framework to support digital transformation of key processes
- Developed a reusable component library and accompanying design guide
- Performed a staged CMS migration with zero downtime to enable better workflow tooling and centralised design layer
- Championed inclusive and accessible design so that all students are able to access key services
- Implemented automated testing and deployment pipelines to improve stability and simplify releases
Spotlight
I was part of a small team who pioneered a new digital student support service from the ground up. Over the course of several years we transformed a large collection of outdated, unsupported content into a premium tier, accessible and inclusive digital service for students and staff to use. The Help Centre, as it is known, now lives in the primary navigation of all student facing websites and serves ~200,000 students per year.
GOS Systems
A global telecommunications carrier, delivering specialised services to government agencies and commercial entities.
Role
Full-stack web developer – working on commercial and government telecomms applications.
Time
2 years
Achievements
- Developed v2 of a flagship product and managed the gradual migration from v1
- Involved in commercial discussions around product ideas and viability
- Developed rapid prototypes for new product ideas
Spotlight
I developed a micropayment system that allowed services to be automatically billed based on usage. This allowed the company to offer more flexibility to their customers and reduce the work required to generate monthly invoices.