I re-built Capsule CRM as a Single Page Application, contributing to the open source community along the way.
This happened in parallel with development on the existing product, and so, for a time there were two versions of Capsule running. The technical challenge was to ensure the customer couldn't tell. And to reduce the boot time of the SPA as much as possible as the user may transition between the two.
Prototyping websites, building hybrid mobile applications, and even art installations for an impressive client list including Spotify, Universal Music, David Lloyd, NUS, Domino Records and more.
Highlights include Guilty Pledgers — a Spotify app that let attendees pledge money in order to manipulate the playlist at a party or event. This was my first use of web sockets.
I worked on modernising SpareRoom's 10 year old Perl codebase, introduced version control, and a test suite.
For 4 years I was the sole developer responsible for writing and managing the CSS and JavaScript for the UK's #1 Flatshare website. I'm proud to say some of the code is still in production today.
Highlights included rendering Rooms For Rent on an interactive map and creating a backoffice tool for detecting spam adverts using a scoring system.
I worked on large scale e-commerce websites, including AJAXifying Flight and Hotel search results for the well known holiday booking site OnTheBeach.co.uk.
In my first job after graduating from university I met with clients in the charity and not for profit sector, and designed, built and supported their website. Using an in-house CMS, and technology like jQuery which was revolutionary at the time!
As a freelancer whilst at university, I designed and developed a real-time web-app for use on stage, that displayed graphs of data collected from SMS messages sent from the audience.
I help organisations design, build, and maintain software systems. My focus is on the user-facing experience, together with the services and data that support it.
For 20 years I've nurtured large code bases, for long periods of time. I'm drawn to this kind of work because I enjoy seeing changes reach customers and then iterating thoughtfully on what comes next.
Earlier in my career, most of this work was a low-level, intricate craft. With the advent of AI, the emphasis has shifted: I still care deeply about naming, conventions, structure, and the right abstractions etc, but I now spend more of my energy shaping problems, setting constraints, and reviewing AI-generated changes so the systems stay coherent over time.
At the moment, my work centres on the hugely popular Capsule CRM, built using modern Ember.js, with a Scala backend. I help build this remotely from Cornwall in the UK.
You can see some of my contributions on Github, or connect with me on LinkedIn.
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