Projects and clients

Here's a sample of recent clients and projects I've worked on.

• 2020–Present

  Join Together

  

  I am a partner at Join Together, a co-operative with a focus on helping unions with their technology. We work closely with unions to design and build the best online join experiences in the industry.

• 2020–2023

  Easol

  

  I worked with Easol (a Y Combinator startup) for three years, joining them as a small 7-person team with just three engineers and provided technical leadership and guidance as they grew through a successful Series A to a team of over 90.

• 2019–2020

  Claim additional payments service, Department for Education

  

  Here I led a new team from a standing start to deliver a service that was making payments to teachers in less than six month in an organisation that was only beginning to learn how to deliver digital services. Along the way we passed two GDS-style service assessments, achieved WCAG 2.1 AAA accessibility and paid out £3.4 million to teachers.

  This is a UK government service, the source code for which is publicly available on GitHub.

• 2018–2019

  Report Management Information, Crown Commercial Service

  

  I joined this troubled project to replace a legacy system that is used by suppliers to report sales made to public sector organisations in the UK. The project had a small team, considerable scope and an ambitious delivery schedule. On top of that a complicated upfront architectural design was hampering the team’s ability to deliver. Over the course of several months I was able to drive the effort to manage the scope, phase the delivery, simplify the architecture and successfully deliver the replacement system.

  This is a UK government service, the source code for which is publicly available on GitHub here and here.

• 2011–2012 and 2017–2018

  FreeAgent

  

  I completed two periods contracting with FreeAgent, working on their accounting software for freelancers and small business. Working independently and within their existing teams I delivered major features, including file attachment support and much of the backend/frontend code driving the new dashboard.

• 2015–2017

  Co-op Digital wills service

  

  I was tech lead on The Co-op’s first live digital service. Whilst quite simple in terms of actual software, the project itself was a complicated one that took a lot of effort to get live, mostly because The Co-op as an organisation had a more traditional IT function and was not used to shipping agile and iterative software projects.

• 2009–2016

  crowd.fm

  

  Back in 2009 I had the idea for a service that would help people running events get them listed across listings sites and social media with a single click. Three years later crowd.fm launched. It even managed to secure some happy paying customers. Ultimately the business failed, but I learnt a metric ton about building and launching software products along the way.

• 2013–2015

  GOV.UK

  

  I contracted as a Ruby developer on GOV.UK primarily working on whitehall, the central publishing system that drives the bulk of the UK government’s content. Whilst there I was responsible for upgrading the application from Rails 3 to 4 and tech led the early efforts to shift it from a single monolithic application to a more service-oriented architecture.