After graduating as a Graphic designer in the early 2000's I specialized as a freelance Flash developer. This then led me to back end developement in PHP/MySQL and JS/CSS3 front end work.
At around this time I began working with Antbits Ltd a digital agency with a focus on the health industry. This lead to a long and fruitful collaboration with a prestigious client base including Elsevier publishing, the BBC, Which magazine, Kings College, Newcastle University and the NHS.
In 2008 Antbits secured a contract to produce inovative interactive tools for NHS Digital. Consulting with civil servants, statisticians and doctors to produce dignostic assessment tools, multimedia timelines, slide shows and mobile apps.
We created the official NHS BMI calculator which used a complex algorithm to calculate child BMI percentiles based on WHO data sets. It served 2 - 3 million users a month at its peak, and was a diagnostic tool doctors and nurses relied upon on a daily basis.
We also adapted a Cambridge University research project on heart health to create an interactive web tool, the NHS Heart age calculator.
At its peak we had well over 100 live projects on the NHS site. We integrated these with our own custom analytics system and CMS's.
Due to a wholesale reorganisation of how the NHS works with external contractors we have unfortunately had to part ways as of 2023, all of the products we worked on have now been either retired or redeveloped to work server side with reduced functionality.
While working for the NHS I became interested in cross platform mobile development, progressing from Appcelerator to React Native.
My background in front end interactivity and experience in building back end systems suited the React Native environment and I was able to build a series of app based publications (MyGuide) for NHS Safeguarding and Social Care Wales that integrated nicely into Wagtail driven sites produced for both these clients.
The majority of recent work has been React Native development, my typical stack is Zustand with MMKV for state management and storage, Firebase for analytics and Fastlane or EAS for deployment.
I took an interest in Django based CMS Wagtail when the NHS adopted it in 2017, I had been wanting to get away from PHP for a while at this point and have been developing knowledge in it ever since and am quite invested in it as a reliable and extensible open source platform. I've also built more lightweight Python projects using Flask.
In terms of front end development, I prefer Vanilla JS or React depending on what is appropriate for the clients needs. I also have passing experience of Docker and Mongo DB and am currently teaching myself Next.js.
I've always been a big proponent of using the Google Docs API and Google Cloud platform to quickly assemble spreadsheet driven utilities for clients. It's a good way of helping clients to understand and be involved in the organization of their projects and to encourage collaboration.
In terms of infrastructure, everything I did was Windows/IIS based for many years, switching to predominantly Ubuntu/Nginx deployments more recently. I'm comfortable with both but prefer Linux these days. In terms of cloud services, I've worked with AWS and Azure, although I currently use Digital Ocean for most projects
The NHS, Elsevier publishing, BBC, Which magazine, King’s College, Slimming World, Newcastle University, the Eden project
I live and work in the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, UK with my wife Jo who is a stained glass artist.