Worked For

Moonpig

Booking.com

BBC

Forepoint

Pre-Career

I have been creating websites since early 2004. My first website was a fan site for the video game Roller Coaster Tycoon, built entirely in HTML tables and inline styles. Throughout High School and College, I treated web development as a hobby, building websites for myself to improve my understanding of HTML and CSS.

In 2009 I completed my 4 A-Levels in Computing, Business Studies, Biology, and Music Technology.

The same year I started my degree in Computer Network Technology. At the time, I thought a career in networking was my future. I took some interest in networking within college because it was the only engaging topic.

I don't know what the education system is like today, but back in 2007-2009, most of the syllabus was taught using Turbo Pascal, which did not inspire me.

In the Summer of 2011, we had to submit an idea for our final year project. Most students were doing something either security-related or school network related. I didn't want to do either of these things. I convinced the course leader for my final year project that I wanted to develop an iOS application. I had no prior experience developing an iOS app and, at the time didn't even own a Mac. It was a huge gamble; I had to learn a new language and develop an application that was somehow related to my networking degree. I used my entire student loan for 2011-2012 and bought myself an iMac and a couple of books on Objective C.

In the end, I built an app called FaceConnect that enabled strangers to FaceTime each other. It was a terrible idea but at its peak had over 6000 users. This meant I had to manage scale and also build in redundancy.

I was eventually awarded a 1:1 in Computer Network Technology from UCLAN and the British Computer Society student of the year award.

Past Work

My first role after university was at a web agency called Forepoint. They are based in Preston, UK, and they have worked with several UK government agencies over the years within the weapon and nuclear sectors.

My role at Forepoint involved developing the frontend for these clients using technologies such as HTML, Sass, jQuery and PHP.

In 2014 I decided to leave Forepoint and joined the BBC. I worked on the BBC Homepage for the first year using NodeJS and React. I believe the BBC Homepage team was the first team in the BBC to use React, with the version number being 0.12.7.

After a year on the Homepage team, I decided to join BBC Sport. I worked on the BBC Live Pages covering large-scale events such as the Rio Olympics, EU Referendum and the US Elections.

The BBC Live Page is a white label product across Sport, BBC News and Music Events. The scale at which BBC used BBC Live Pages allowed me to discover my interest in design systems and themes. Each page could have a different brand depending on the event but also had to incorporate common BBC elements. It allowed me to work alongside some fantastic people working on BBC GEL and Grandstand, and some of that work is the most exciting work I've had to work on so far in my career.

In 2018 I left the BBC and joined Booking.com for a year. I found the work mostly the same as the work I did at the BBC and did not have a passion for the product I was working on, so I decided to leave Booking.com in 2019.

Current

2019 was a good year, I got married and visited Star Wars Galaxy Edge on opening day, but it was also the year I joined Moonpig, my current employer.

For the last 2 years, I have been working in the customisation experience space. Throughout 2020 I worked on the user-facing Card Editor experience. This project is fascinating as it is built entirely using SVG and made interactive using React and is the thing our customers interact with when creating their cards.

In early 2021 I was given the opportunity to move teams and work on an internal tool called Studio that enables our artworkers to create card templates that are published on the Moonpig website and app. We're trying not to reinvent photoshop but instead give our artworkers the tools to adjust or import photoshop files directly.

Future

I am not actively looking for a new role. However, I firmly believe I should not close on potential opportunities. If you think I would be a good fit for a role, please read my job requirements first and get in touch.