Making things that work for us work even better for others

Figs of London is a small independent record label primarily responsible for releasing the work of Marseille Figs & MOLE. Danger Island, our Kickstarter funded double LP, is released on 17th August 2018.

I joined ROLI 6 months before they launched their consumer-oriented BLOCKS. The last two years saw rapid growth for the company, partnering with both Apple and Google, and I had to adapt and expand to meet those challenges. My initial role of Senior Web Developer grew into Solutions Architect, DevOps, SRE and Senior Javascript Developer. After April 2018 I additionally undertook the role of Platform Lead managing the development of their API, flagship websites and e-commerce integrations. My evolving role entailed close contact with stakeholders across the whole business and broadly covered the following areas of responsibility, with an overview of my main contributions to each:API and web-services infrastructure: - Architected and provisioned the web-services cluster around ROLIs Node+Express API using customised Elastic Beanstalk applications, and CircleCI for CI/CD. - Migrated a legacy Rails system and data to the new API. - Setup and maintained the API's MongoDB cluster using AWS CloudFormation, Route53 & Cloud.MongoDB. - Ongoing JavaScript/ES6 feature development across all services to support evolving business needs and SaaS integrations. e.g. Expanding authentication for external SSO consumers (support, forums & CRM systems); Licence handling from store purchase to ROLI software; improved logging.Flagship sites ROLI.com & JUCE.com: - Containerised CI/CD deployment workflows using CircleCI, AWS ECS & Elastic Beanstalk. - WebPack and Babel build optimisation for faster deploy times. - Improved Contentful “CMSaaS” cost and performance with a custom NGINX proxy & AWS Cloudfront CDN; Oversaw translation integration with Smartling.General operations, management and R&D - Managing daily operation and long-term planning for the Platform team. - Providing practical developer support, code reviews and mentoring. - Cloud monitoring & optimisations; Scheduled backups; DNS management. - Improving cost efficiency of cloud services & e-commerce solutions.

Developing cutting-edge online interactive entertainment formats for ourselves and clients including BBC, NHS, Saga and Pokerstars.Alongside steering our product development and running the technical team, I have responsibility for system design, setup, build and administration of all server-side components. Extensive use of AWS, PostgreSQL & MongoDB; command line scripts to batch encode video assets (ffmpeg) and synchronise with the CDN (S3 to Fastly), deployment scripts, and a hi-res dynamic image server that generates multi-layered unique images for Facebook shares.

After our initial consultancy work, Studio Ex Nihilo was acquired by multi-tiered UK agency VCCP as in in-house invention agency. I was responsible for defining and building digital prototypes, products and services for clients including: Telefonica, Sony, o2, Easyjet, The AA, Saga, Nesta, Acromas & Zapp.Most notably, I led the development of o2 Travel - an offline travel app integrating Telefonica tariff subscription services, content from TripAdvisor and maps from Nokia. We built native iOS and Android applications individually customised for 3 markets and a supporting middleware solution that automatically generated unique offline travel packs for over 500 European destinations. I worked as system architect, development team lead & client-facing technical liaison.

Whilst at Oil I fulfilled the roles of both Lead developer and CTO, leading a small development team building web and mobile apps with supporting backend services. I worked on technical specifications, IA, built a bespoke cross-domain CMS in Ruby on Rails and a number of smaller bespoke solutions for online projects.Clients included: The Conran Group, Activision, Nissan, Angel Hartnett.

Through a number of short and ongoing contracts, we built a range of hand-crafted website solutions and online tools to suit artists' needs.Alongside these bespoke sites we developed a Ruby on Rails template system for visual artists to easily manage their online presence: http://greatwhitewall.com.

Primarily developing for the TUC's worksmart.org.uk, I managed their development environment and their server, built online tools for people to better understand their rights at work, and had general oversight for the code quality and the day-to-day running of the site.

Whilst at HHB Dialogue, I was responsible for the technical development of an innovative market research tool called The White Room. This was a suite of tools for distributing questions to groups of users; collecting, transcribing and evaluating their videoed responses, and generating comparative charts for derived QUAL and QUANT data.The backend was built in primarily in Ruby on Rails, using Apache ActiveMQ for asynchronous video processing, and interfacing with an MMS media gateway to deliver and retrieve user messages.

I built: - RESTful API in PHP to an event management tool called EVENT. - Twitter/Flickr aggregator that collected and packaged resources up for FTP collection and eventual inclusion in a daily print magazine.

Web development as part of a team, maintaining standards compliance and accessibility for web and digital TV. Lead front-end developer for UMS Conversations, an experiment in social software that created a virtual space to facilitate unbounded, extremely localized threaded discussion (See presentation here: http://www.plasticbag.org/files/misc/etech.ppt).

Lots of tables. HTML tables. Tables in tables in tables. Those were the days.