Nutmeg
The largest digital wealth manager in Europe.
I was hired to help Nutmegs efforts decompose its legacy monolithic Ruby application into smaller React micro-frontends.
Currently I lead 7 front-end engineers on the Engagers team. We work on the authenticated web experience which covers: login, the investor dashboard and portfolios, payments, withdrawals, transactions, performance and ISA settings. I am responsible for the technical planning, front-end architecture, domain health, and owner of several key product initiatives.
Since becoming a Senior Lead Software Engineer I have established team skill-shares/ requirements contracts/ test plans, run cross-team workshops on screen-readers/ XState/ Formik/ open banking, and helped build the wider front-end team having interviewed, hired and on-boarded new engineers.
Previously on the Payments team I built products that allow customers to invest their money into the stock market. Highlights were building SCA PSD2 compliant debit card/ open banking/ direct debit payments with React, developing new features such as 3rd party payments/ JISA and CTF transfers/ drip-feed (that featured on TV), alongside increasing code coverage to 100%/ making CI pipelines 62% faster/ and handling a Stripe outage over tax year end.
Being so close to customers life savings and pensions is a huge responsibility.
On both teams I advocate resilience being a feature through graceful degradation (a topic I wrote about for London's 2020 Fintech week). I truly believe in providing customers with as much value as possible by building UIs that adapt to the functionality they can offer. Some examples are falling back to manual bank transfers when open banking payments are unavailable, offering PDF downloads when our 3rd party ISA transfer provider has downtime, plus common techniques such XHR retries, long polling, and feature detection.
I'm also an official ambassador for Nutmegs design system (called Nutkit), and a self appointed accessibility champion focussed on extending Nutmegs mission of democratising wealth management to also apply to web inclusivity.
KAYAK
Americas largest meta travel search engine.
AB testing is integral to KAYAKs culture and success however can come at a cost. Hundreds of concurrent AB tests lead to less than ideal performance budgets on the front-end.
This directly impacts users since bigger CSS and JavaScript bundles equate to a slower experience and higher costs for those when volume-based charging is in place such as mobile networks.
Tasked with making kayak.com faster whilst on the Core UI Architecture team I worked on an internal atomic CSS library that removed 63% of CSS from the homepage. Highlights were personally building core components such as the hotel search form, and the site-wide header and footer.
On the Paid Search team I designed and developed UI components, landing pages and server-side middleware that reach millions of users a day.
I took lead on several internal projects. Most notably PUG: a React/ Redux webapp that helps programmatic marketers manage ad campaigns, and Prèvue: a Vue.js chrome extension that allows account managers to preview sponsored content.
I was also on the winning team of Performance SWAT Week 2016, in which a hard line approach to performance budgets resulted in 25% faster page loads. A brief stint in ad-tech saw me build a customisable ad placement on the homepage.
Commusoft
The UKs leading software for field service engineers.
Commusoft began with a solo founder who dropped out of uni to build web based software for gas, electric, plumbing and heating engineers.
Fast-forward 7 years and the platform was in desperate need of a redesign and technical uplift in order to expand into global markets. I was enlisted to lead a close-knit team of front-end designers and developers to build Commusoft v4 from the ground up.
My role was shared across design and engineering.
We quickly realised the strong correlation between customer support and design. An improved user experience would scale with the growing customer base.
Two pain-points spring to mind. The first was helping non-tech-savvy users get to grips with complex workflows. For this we leveraged CSS and JavaScript animation to help guide users through journeys. The second was the need for speed. While most advances in this area were technical skeleton screens helped increase the perceived speed and overall polish of the product.
I built core features in AngularJS such as the spreadsheet used for efficient data capturing for estimates/ invoicing/ stock control, and the calendar used for real-time communication between onsite and offsite teams.
Onboarding new engineers and training junior colleagues really solidified a passion for mentoring. In 2015 I visited the Chennai office to help align engineering practices between teams.
A tech company at its core Commusoft saw the value in giving back. I helped raise the companies tech profile via open source projects such as DateJust.js, SLAB, and Complete-Me.
Serious Fox
A web design and development agency.
This is where it all started. Half way through a two week internship Serious Fox offered me a full-time role.
As the companies second hire I watched it grow from a couple of guys working out of an apartment to a close-knit team of highly talented designers and engineers.
I became obsessed with the way systems were built, a discipline I later learnt was called architecture. Over 2.5 years I honed my design and engineering skills thanks to two incredible mentors Josh Crowder and Alex Handley.
On reflection agency life really kickstarted my career. In a short amount of time I got hands on experience with a diverse range of web technologies, industries and projects.
Some of my proudest client work includes static websites to enterprise level applications for Dell, ABM Industries, Barbour and Tottenham Hotspur F.C.