React / Front-end and Full Stack Development

Natwest / RBS

Worked in the mPlatform Development team responsible for building and running the middle tier services that provide functionality and connectivity into the core banking systems within the RBS Group. 
Built Java micro-services utilising the Vertx Framework and deployed across AWS Infrastructure using Terraform. Developed the back-end services for the Personal and Business Banking mobile applications across the RBS retail brands representing daily volumes of between 5-7 million logins per day and peak loads of 12-15k logins per minute. 


Java Developer

Elwood Technologies

Elwood Technologies is a fast-growing, London-based fintech, building digital assets trading infrastructure for institutional investors. Its seamless end-to-end platform connects to global crypto exchanges, custodians, and liquidity providers, via a single Application Programming Interface (API). 
Built market connectors for various exchange (Coinbase, Okex and Tagomi) and internal monitoring (audit and risk management). Elwood platform is mainly in GoLang with Python and SQL. 
-	Primarily responsible for trade support in crypto products covering Spot, Futures, Perpetual Swaps, Options and Loans.
-	Configuration of Client funds and books and account set-up, including compliance rules.
-	Maintain the reference data around new exchange product setup and commission schedules.
-	Building risk reports for clients and internal use.
-	Assist in gathering and/or reviewing client's process requirements and assisting on architect design decisions with the rest of the team.
-	Operating and analysing continuous monitoring tools in performing ongoing monitoring tools of Elwood infrastructure.


Backend Engineer

Haruko

Haruko is an easy-to-use platform that gives institutional investors the levels of insights, control, and compliance they demand when trading digital assets. 
Primarily responsible for building API & real-time frameworks for coalescing connectivity across exchanges. 
-	Responsible for building the internal development framework on which the system was built.
-	Built WebSocket integrations and live price sourcing on both DeFi & CeFi.
-	Reverse engineering defi & crypto protocols and building institutional views on the most popular DeFi protocols (Aave, Curve, Uniwap, Solana & Serum etc).  


Senior Java Developer

The BBC Accounts team are responsible for the day-to-day management of online users including the most common workflows (sign in/ password recovery and access across devices). These services are responsible for millions of requests per day.

My function was to rebuild the backend around user password management aswell as move to a new in house user token management system. These were mostly typescript / java micro services hosted in AWS.

Java & Go Development, Backend Engineer

Angular 2 Services

Journey Hospitality

Development of a new v2 of their internal API systems written in Symfony5 as well as worked on a number of legacy Laravel projects

Symfony Consultant

Circa 5000 (formally Tickr)

Worked on the API systems that power their mobile app, focusing on Carbon Offset and Carbon footprint calculators

Laravel Developer

New Scientist

Provided a new set of CI/CD tools (gitlab and jenkins) and APM (NewRelic) to aid in the on-going improvements to their release pipelines and websites after the split from parent company Reed

DevOps Consultant

Squawka

Built a statistics API platform translate and process football player information about matches, players and teams

ElasticSearch Consultant

Symfony, Laravel, AWS DevOps, PHP8, ELK, CI/CD, TDD, BDD, SOLID

Nationwide Building Society

Mortgages

MyKindaFuture

Full-stack developer role to help with rebrand and adding new features to client's applications.

Connectr

Full stack development

Bombinate Ltd

Senior Developer

Bombinate

Bombinate is a £3m+ a year marketplace for high quality European craftsmanship brands selling to luxury consumers
- Actively liaised with stakeholders on the supplier side of the business to design and deliver technical solutions to core business problems such as:
- Implementing unique SKU (item) shipping prices & times set by suppliers from the inventory management system which saved between £2000-5000+ per day in large item shipping costs for Bombinate, improved delivery brackets for each item and scaled back customer service complaints as sales scaled up
- Improving the dashboard experience for suppliers as it was buggy and lacked essential time-saving and human error-eliminating features. The following features greatly improved supplier relations: Adding the option to download order data into a clean CSV format (previously suppliers had to manually type in details into their own systems), edit new, completed & shipped order details and auto-generate invoices for suppliers to download.
- Infrastructure:
- Audited AWS infrastructure for security, scaling and monitoring issues then
created & scoped tickets for the backlog for any issues found
- Created a roadmap to get close as possible to the AWS Well-Architected
framework by Q4 2020 (when sales should accelerate) including moving to AWS Lambda, AWS APIGateway, AWS Aurora, AWS ELB for some apps and slowly integrating GraphQL to reduce massive payload sizes to the FE. Those implementations would reduce monthly tech expenses while smoothly handling traffic spikes on demand.
- Installed Datadog for monitoring which helped troubleshoot and optimise end-to-end application performance and bust pesky NodeJS memory leaks
-
- Reusable Component UI library:
- Oversee the building of UI components with Storybook, and setting best practices such as unit tests, scalable file structures, continuous deployment for easier QA syncing with design team and other recommended practices
- Guided a junior developer to work on the component library and get used to the FE codebase
- Decoupled some parts of the website such as the Navigation menu and search filters from being reliant on the tech team to being in control of the merchandising and marketing teams with Prismic content editor
- Worked with the product manager, tech team and stakeholders to properly scope tickets and clear miscommunications ahead of upcoming sprints
- Fixed numerous bugs across the frontend, backend and dashboard and promoted a tech culture that reduces the likelihood of bugs happening by encouraging unit tests with most pull requests, setting up pre-commit hooks to detect errors, Github PR templates for descriptive PRs, scalable folder structures, reasonable integration tests, common VSCode settings for code styles.

Bombinate.com

ECMWF

The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) required the development of a complex admin dashboard for their clusters of supercomputers (one of the largest facilities in the world) and hired me to fully develop the system.
As lead engineer, I was in charge of the entire software development lifecycle. This includes:
- Having an extensive discovery and planning phase with key product owners
to productively extract actionable requirements, stories and steps
- Developing the full wireframes of the supercomputer dashboards while being in close contact with the various stakeholders of ECMWF
- Liaising with ECMWF’s backend developers as well as product owners to develop a well-architected and well-documented API for the frontend dashboard and clearly documenting each API endpoint that the frontend will use with Swagger API and OpenAPI 3.0 specification.
- Developing a robust, well-tested and architected application with React and Redux using best practices for a scalable interface with a smooth user experience
- Documenting each part of the dashboard codebase for future developers
- Training future users of the dashboard on how it works, how to use it as well as add a comprehensive documentation wiki on Confluence
- Provide any post-delivery support for up to 1 month after delivery

Dashboard Development

Drover (now Cazoo)

I was brought in to fix a large buggy Rails / React codebase, help improve the engineering processes at Drover and build their mobile app prototype. Drover got acquired by Cazoo Ltd (for over £100 million in 2020).
- Improved the web app’s performance by removing dead code, setting up tree-shaking with Webpack, code-splitting where needed, lazy-loading images, using a CDN service such as imgix to also optimise images on mobile devices, prevent unnecessary re-renders with React components, fix memory leaks, encourage writing performant CSS, remove thread blocking code, cache expensive API calls, and use Chrome Lighthouse and React Profiler to reduce the overall bundle size
- Guiding the team with best engineering practices such as writing relevant tests, “not reinventing the wheel”, having better coding standards, ensuring pull requests are carefully reviewed, documenting, introducing TypeScript
- Encouraged developers to take ownership of improving the engineering culture by suggesting weekly guild meetings to discuss ideas, introducing Confluence for decision logs and incident reports, discussing concerns to senior management
- Coordinated, discussed and planned with various stakeholders and developers to build several features to meet KPIs across squads for a particular aspect of the business
- Sprint planning, breakdown of stories and epics into technical tasks for developers, designers and product owners
- Encouraged a move to microservices to be efficient with our tech expenditure and microfrontends to vastly simplify the codebase complexity for each part of the business.

Several features

Tripartie


Tripartie urgently required a mobile prototype to raise further funding, I stepped in to build upon their existing mobile app codebase, setup a CI testing environment with Expo and improve several memory leaks across the codebase.
I used React Native / Redux and Styled Components for their reusable UI library.

Mobile App

Phantom Studios

● Worked closely with their main client TariLabs - a California-based Web3 / NFT startup - to work on their huge backlog of tasks and bugs in a large, complex, buggy codebase that we inherited
● Fixed numerous bugs, introduced Storybooks to preview components for more visibility and so that design, developer and product teams can collaborate easier on those, encouraged integration, unit, snapshot and visual regression testing
● Encourage best frontend practices such as re-using components where possible, improve redux performance where multiple actions were being needlessly called, profiling React components to prevent unnecessary renders, remove unused packages, lazy load pages where appropriate and improve Chrome Lighthouse scores
● Added new features to the website such as revamped Metamask login / wallet connection with web3 / ethers.js and new components and pages
 
● Contributed to group discussions about new features and best tools to use for our use-case


NFT Sharing Platform

0xA Technologies

● Worked closely with a product manager, designers and developers to develop a bespoke NFT platform for the United States Football League (USFL) via Fox, the SXSW Festival NFT website, 0xA’s website and 0xArt - their invite-only product for NFT sales
● Encouraged best practices engineering-wide such as: bi-weekly meetings to discuss engineering improvements, encouraging developers to be product-oriented and increase sense of ownership, ,impactful pull request templates, writing E2E tests with Cypress for critical purchase and other user flows, using RainbowKit instead of custom-building ethers/Web3.js wallet integrations, making use of 3rd party services to improve products such as Hotjar for feedback gathering, Marker.io for better bug tracking, Imgix to serve assets, Google Analytics etc
● Frontend best-practices such as: caching where required instead of multiple fetches to the backend where appropriate, dynamic imports with NextJS, remove unused dependencies with depcheck, preloading content, optimising images and scripts, using semantic HTML for component library, error logging into monitoring services,
● Helped scope out Jira tickets and tasks in careful detail to avoid any mis-communications across developers, design and other stakeholders
● Worked on payment flows with RainbowKit and ethers.js and web3.js
● Use feature flags for enabling or disabling features on demand and if certain features
were problematic (i.e 3rd party dependencies encountering issues that end up
affecting our products)
● Introduced Contentful to manage website copy so non-technical people can edit
content without requiring developers

NFT Platforms

FairHQ


● Took ownership of their frontend products and fixed bugs & performance issues
● Rationalized technical stack to be simple, easy to hire for, and based on battle-tested
Open Source technology (Node.js, PostgreSQL, React)
● Interviewed and managed 3 freelancers to update FairHQ’s Wordpress website
● Automated build, testing and continuous deployment with Github Actions CI
● Clarified ambiguous feature tasks into precise, detailed, well-scoped tickets
● Integrated logic so that surveys could be sent twice a year rather than once (which was
costing them business) and translated new Figma designs into React pages
● Worked with the CTO to fix general bugs, increase coding standards (tests, pre-commit
hooks, documentation) add improved backend monitoring
● Suggested improvements to the company in general, such as automating manual
document-checking with AI (with AWS A2i etc), streamlined onboarding system, hiring product managers as they scale and improving communication


Maintenance 

React JS / Node / AWS Development

Software engineering .NET

Personal project

During lockdown I built a sharable workout timer www.lovehiit.io.

This works as both a website and mobile app.

Love HIIT

Freelance

Design GUI is a browser extension for managing Design Systems in Tailwind CSS.

Browser extension design tool

Frontend 

Smart Pension

Senior developer on a team that created the Analytics platform for Smart Pension users

Smart Pension 

Fullstack web development 

Chunk

Website for the UK branch of The NFL’s charitable foundation. I initially helped the agency with the technical scoping of the project, using their Figma designs to plan the technical requirements. The website is a custom-built WordPress website which makes extension use of custom Gutenberg blocks, Advanced Custom Fields and TailwindCSS.

Working in conjunction with Tyk's marketing, creative and technical teams, I developed a bespoke WordPress theme. A key requirement of the project was to create a bespoke content editing system in WordPress which would allow their internal teams to fully manage the website content without requiring a developer or coding skills. I achieved this by building reusable custom blocks which they can drop onto a page and configure as needed, all while keeping the website onbrand.

Website development

Future Cities Catapult

I worked with Future Cities Catapult on their project to develop digital information kiosks located around Newscastle, UK. These kiosks - called TechTotems - display up-to-date weather and event data for the surrounding area. I setup WordPress multisite and developed a custom WordPress theme. This allows for the central management of the theme and plugins but a separate website for each TechTotem. Each TechTotem connects to a JSON file containing the live data for that particular location and automatically displays that data in the WordPress theme.

Future Cities Catapult: Tech Totem

Ebury

WordPress website for a finance company. I collaborated with their in-house designers and developers to assist with rebuilding the company website.

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