A compilation of my professional work
Tech Stack:
TrainAway.fit
Starting from scratch with a start-up with big dreams, I developed and maintained the Node.js back-end services for payments, user handling, geospatial data, data administration and partner APIs as well as the AWS infrastructure and orchestration to support it. As we grew, I also oversaw the development team (front-end and mobile app) and eventually trained new developers to take over development and maintenance of the service.
In 2019, TrainAway started cooperation with IHRSA — enabling on-the-go gym access to nearly 1,000 gyms in more than 30 countries — for which I completed a large refactoring and extension of the back-end system, enabling support for partner systems, data-sharing, on-location scanners and a wide variety of other new features.
AllCongress.com
Taking over from a half-finished project, I redid the frontend code and significantly improved the speed and safety of the backend - taking the site from extremely slow, to matching Google.com speeds. The payment system was also overhauled and expanded and some design work thrown in for good measure.
Mingoville.com
Approached with the task of making updates to and maintenance of the online-based English course provider, Mingoville much simpler, faster and cheaper, I rebuilt the site, basing it on easily editable parts — such as Pug/Jade and Markdown — ensuring hosting demands were kept to a minimum and the site structure and design could be edited with ease.
For the same reasons, it was built around a custom static generator pipeline utilising standard Makefiles and had full separation of concerns for every component, ensuring they could each be moved and swapped around as necessary without needing to dive into any development work.
General Work
Outside of designing full systems, I've worked in a variety of fields. From container shipping to card games and from contract management to airport navigation. I've seen the tech landscape go from jQuery and MooTools, through Backbone and Ember, the beginnings of AngularJS and back into the smaller frameworks like Mithril and Knockout and back into fully fledged ecosystems and transpilers with React, Svelte and Vue.
On the server-side, I saw the ongoing homogenisation of PHP, the rise of Ruby and Python, with a stop by Elixir and Erlang, the explosive landscape of the JavaScript ecosystem, from Node.js and Express, through micro-services, edge computing and serverless, TypeScript and functional JS frameworks, to full environments like Next.js and Nuxt.js.
In recent years, I've helped LLMs stay on track and produce usable output, be that by building a language based UI framework; defining possible paths through visual story telling tools and custom Ink scripts; homogenising huge data sets; or just help automating manual tasks.
Pharma Contract Work
I've built a nice variety of projects for Zoetis, Pfizer, Bayer and Roche through an intermediary (which means I'm not allowed to name which client matches which project).
These include:
- A data-warehouse server infrastructure design, implementation and maintenance
- An analytics server and API
- Various iPad utility and presentation apps
- Web-sites for marketing and internal use
Apart from the web-sites — which were done as part of a team — the others were done as solo projects.