About me

Mugshot of your truly

I have worked in the internet industry since around 2000, starting off as a digital producer for a scientific publishing house in London. Along the way I’ve worked for various agencies as a permanent member of staff or a contractor in dev teams, as a designer and occasionally in management. I've made tons of cool digital things with cutting-edge technologies like WML, Flash and, erm, ColdFusion. :)

Technical skills

I split my skills very roughly into two areas; UX design and front-end development. My favourite thing to do is create and iterate interactive prototypes for user testing using something like Node/Express - sadly this is usually only a luxury on larger projects. My second favourite thing to do is work with users to design, build and implement living style guides or pattern libraries, creating tested designs and turning them into into flexible, modular and scalable code which can be dropped into an application. My front-end work has a strong focus on usability, performance, accessibility and cross-platform delivery.

UX

  • Planning and conducting investigative research with users
  • Designing responsive layouts with Photoshop or Sketch
  • Creating flat or interactive wireframes using things like Axure or Omnigraffle
  • Testing with users and analysing findings to work back into designs
  • Creating fully-interactive, coded prototypes for testing

Front-end

  • Building with semantic, minimal HTML5
  • Creating modular, scalable CSS (usually with SCSS but can use LESS)
  • JavaScript, largely weaned off jQuery and gone back to vanilla JS or working with WebPack, ES6 & babel
  • Task/work-flow management with Grunt or Gulp (sometimes both FTW!)
  • NodeJS, usually with Express
  • Some PHP & MySQL
  • Git. I have used things like SVN and TFS but they blow goats compared to terminal and Git
  • Happy working with systems built on PHP, Java or .NET, cool with MVC etc

Useful experience

It's not just about "tech skills":

  • Very happy to work as part of a broadly-skilled team including, for example; business analysts, product owners, architects and developers, management and stakeholders etc. A "confident communicator", and as a front-end developer, I'm used to spanning gaps between development, design and customer.
  • Fully versed in various flavours of Agile and used to MVP, iterations, sprints, standups, Kanban, velocity, burn-down (or burn-up) charts etc. Also used to various management tools such as Jira, Rally and Trello.
  • When I'm not at work, I tend to be hanging out with my kids, running around the Mendips, snowboarding when I can or cooking loads of weird food.