I am a lesser known blend of [logic (<-oxymoronic right?->) creative] mixed with strategy. I love learning, I am obsessive over the details. I enjoy problem solving. I have a habit of creating said problems through life challenges. Within technology these include founding two ecommerce businesses. One sold to a FTSE 250 company. Outside of technology these include competing in IronMan triathlons and currently in the middle of managing the (re)build of my home.
I am currently a senior frontend engineer / product lead using my skills in data analysis, problem solving, communication and ability to work in a team. I acquired these skills through being a successful ecommerce entrepreneur, failed ecommerce entrepreneur, enjoying my work in interesting tech startups and Makers Academy alumnus.
Tech Skills : JavaScript >> TypeScript, Node.js, React, graphql/apollo, nextjs, Webpack, Babel, HTML5, CSS3, Styled Components and/or Emotion JS
Test, Learn, Action. Repeat. Utilising quite a feedback tools/methodologies such as TDD, Pull requests, QA testing, fast agile iterations, interaction with stakeholders/PMs and do so by selling all principles to my direct team via collaborative agreement.
I have the ability to find what is exciting about a project, and bring this enthusiasm to a whole team. I also have the perseverance to get things done and to keep going with a problem until it is solved. This approach, along with my soft skills from historic product roles, has enabled me to go from a junior engineer to senior and also take on the role of a product lead in one of the two product teams.
March 2020 - March 2021 Education Squad - Built new Academy website (https://tray.io/academy/). Personally created POC in my own time to take legacy documentation website (https://tray.io/documentation/) from Gatsby to NextJS and in doing so local build times from ~12 minutes to 15 seconds and pipeline build times from 50 minutes to ~5 minutes. March 2021 - Current - Embedded Squad - Took lead on the project to move Embedded REST requests to use React Query with inbuilt caching. Complicated with being the first project to also move embedded code into the new NX monorepo which required extensive planning to maintain a working, granular dependency graph.
Working within a team of 5 to deliver a new web dashboard for all lenders or merchants who self finance their lending. We moved to an apollo federated architecture written in Typescript that further enhances our DDD approach to modelling the businesses data into a single source of truth. We also moved to a new design system that is the basis of Divido's new UI library.
Working with Nextjs, React and graphql stack, worked within the team to deliver a new web app for all merchants to handle their finance applications. Notable achievements:
- Introduced and helped move entire front-end team to Typescript from Flow. Includes starting the work to move all types to the graphql layer so all web app's would have a single source of truth as a form of Domain Driven Design.
- Built, independently, a new formatting library to allow for programmatic localisation for all currencies, dates, numbers and percentages.
- Successfully launched new Merchant portal web app, with theming and localisation (language and formatting) built in.
- Promoted after 7 months to product lead of all Divido 'portals' (dashboards).
Primarily working in Javascript (ES6+) , or its superset Typescript, working on data reporting pipelines and creating a new header bidding product to enable the companies primary advertising platform to work programmatically. Our team works in a fully agile environment, using TDD, utilising the Alassian suite. We aim to have as near to 100% coverage for newly introduced code as possible.
Head of product for Amchara. A health start-up targeting chronic health conditions and the life-style decisions that lead to them. Ambition is to move complete product online although startup constraints slowed this down.
Advising businesses on their digital strategy and then help execute on that advice.
Founded to make wine exploration easier and more fun. Built on Spree (Ruby on Rails ecommerce) framework we eventually built our own ecommerce platform on Rails due to heavy technical debt forked version of Spree created. Brought out by investor over disagreements on share structure; shut down shortly afterwards.
First national bulk online grocery retailer in UK. Founded in 2009. Sold to Booker PLC two years later. Brand absorbed by Booker. Subsequently project managed rolling out B2C channel across Booker before leaving to start DropWines
Makers Academy - Apr '17
- Curiosity and hungry passion for understanding coding
- Independent learner and problem-solver
- OOP, TDD, SOLID, MVC, DDD
- Software Craftsmanship
- Ruby, Rails, Javascript, Node.js, jQuery
- Rspec, Jasmine, Mocha, Karma, PhantomJS
- PostgreSQL, MongoDB
Warwick University - 2001 - 2002
- Telecommunication and Electronic Engineering
- Course cancelled at the end of first year
- Sponsored by Marconi PLC whom subsidised the course within Warwick University. At end of first year Marconi collapsed and Warwick cancelled the course.
- Enjoying down-time with my family
- Travel
- Reading / Movies
- Cycling
- Triathlon