Building beautiful digital experiences
Get in touch 🚀Companies
A few great places I have worked
2021 - 2022
Fast
One click checkout
Fast was a hyper growth start up based in San Francisco where as an engineer, tech lead and manager I focused on building the user experience for one click checkout to work across the entire internet.
2017 - 2020
Thriva
Helping people take control of their health
As the second employee and first engineer at this fast paced health tech start up, I worked across the technology stack — building applications and a team from the ground up.
2016 - 2019
Hopscotch digital
Taking digital product development on the road
Our office was a campervan and our clients were located all around the world. As lead developer, I was involved from ideation and strategy to building and delivering the final polished solution to our clients.
2016 - 2017
Keepsite
Simple project management for construction
Contracting as a full stack engineer at this pre-launch start up, I was working alongside the company founders to deliver the first version of our applications for web, iOS and Android.
2012 - 2016
Xero
Beautiful accounting software
As a front end developer working with a global, cross collaborative team on xero.com. We were regularly shipping the highest quality user experiences to our millions of users.
About
What I do
Builder of beautiful digital experiences that delight both users and developers.
I enjoy solving problems with design and technology. Not just solving them plain and simple, but solving them with a high level of elegance. To do this I enjoy working in cross-collaborative teams and can work across the tech stack to design, architect and build the best solution possible to solve the problem at hand. I am also experienced at managing teams having hired and lead multiple teams, grown engineers from junior to seniors and managed several high paced projects at early stage and mature start ups.
How I like to work and my process
I like getting involved in projects early and shipping regularly.
Products, projects and features are delivered by teams and it's important to have people working on cross-collaborative teams involved throughout to ensure the best possible experience is delivered to the user. Since every project is different, the following can be adapted depending on the size and scope of the project. Here are some of the steps I like to follow.
Discover
Digital products don't exist without users, so to know what to build next I love talking to users and getting their feedback. This can be done through several mediums and provides the product team with a wealth of knowledge ensuring you are developing your product in a productive direction that users will appreciate, use and enjoy.
Define
Input from users can be overwhelming and can give you hundreds of problems to solve. These need to be prioritised and scoped out to keep the project focused on delivering features that solve the problems at hand. It pays to really define what you are going to be working on and scope the project if you're hoping to deliver value to users in a timely manner.
Design
Once what your working on has been defined, the design process can start. I enjoy working with designers where possible to input on user flows and being involved throughout the wireframing and high fidelity design stages to input from a technology perspective. Users can be involved in this process again to ensure you are on the right path. Developers can design the technical solution, define the architecture and scope the build while the designers are working away.
Build
Building the solution is naturally my favourite part of the process as the developer. I love getting involved in all aspects, front end and back end to craft the best user experience possible. During this stage, I like to work closely with designers to make sure the experience is coming to life as they had envisioned.
Ship 🚀
Once the build is complete, testing needs to take place - both automated and manual. Once this is done the project is ready to ship. I like to, where possible, build in a feedback mechanism so you can continue to see how your newly adapted or shipped feature is performing against user expectations.
Iterate
Digital products are never finished, so I've added in an iteration phase to this process. This allows teams to continuously deliver value in small increments to users as it provides the space to iterate and improve in future versions. It can also remove the fear of shipping things until they are perfect. Still quality needs to be upheld so defining when the releases happen as part of the planning is key here.