I am lead developer over at Stickyeyes, managing a team of developers and testers and love coding and figuring problems out.
My career so far
After graduating from Leeds College of Art in 2012 specialising in Graphic Design, I quickly started at Stickyeyes as a Junior Designer. A year or so after with a growing love for coding (teaching myself in my spare time), I moved over to the development side of the team. Eight years later and I am still at Stickyeyes having worked my way through to Lead Developer now managing the development team.
I have worked at every level of our development team and love bringing this range of experience to help guide my team of developers and testers. This helps us when working across a huge range of creative and technical projects with the wider Design and Development team.
My skillsets
One of my biggest strengths as a developer has always been my ability to take on a challenge.
Creative Development – One of my favourite things to work on is a creative challenge when creating PR campaigns for our clients. Whether that has been using the Twitter API, creating 3D globe cartograms or inventing interactive games I really like the variety and learning new skills from each of them.
WordPress Development – I have used WordPress as the basis for my content managed builds throughout my career, and am highly skilled at creating bespoke highly performant, secure solutions using this platform. I am looking to bring my Gutenberg experience up to this level too.
Internal Tool Builds – Optimising processes is something that I feel passionate about. Over the years when I've seen processes where I think I can help I have created tools and scripts to accumatively save hundreds of work hours letting people get back to using their expert skills on the next task at hand.
Highlights of projects I've worked on
They might be one of my favourite projects because of the results, the challenge of doing them or even just because they were a lot of fun!
Agency life means that I can't always name names with a lot of the projects that I have worked on, however the below gets straight to the detail, which is the interesting part anyway.
Poker Probability Engine
Possibly my favourite project I ever worked on was creating a poker probability engine for users to be able to calculate their probability of winning with any given hand. To me this is the clearest example of my work where it isn't immediately obvious for the user how sophisticated it is behind the scenes, but it brought me sheer joy with the hours of figuring out how to build it.
One of the biggest challenges of this project was that it had to be completely client side. With no database of previous game data allowed, I created a mathematical system of hand comparison and implemented the Monte Carlo method, where using the declared cards, multiple games are played and tracked to give their probability. On top of this I was also set very ambitious speed performance targets of 5,000 games in five seconds with a high level of accuracy.
I managed to completely smash the performance target and built a system where over 10,000 games are played in under one second and a highly accurate probability given (even on low powered devices) via a highly usable interface on either mobile or desktop.
NFL Draft Social Analysis Tool
In order to comment on who are the 'hot picks' for the NFL Draft, me and my team built a tool that would track Twitter mentions and rank players in real time, along with analysing which team Twitter predicted may pick them. This required a lot of back-end analysis and performance optimisation, and was hugely successful.
Although not an American Football fan, I very much enjoyed figuring out how to use the Twitter API to our needs and building our own analysis tool and performant API for use with a seperate React Application.
Talking Experience
40x40 Design – 'Dev is part of the design process'
I took part in 40x40.design, a sell-out event organised by my team for Leeds Digital Festival; An event consisting of forty two minute talks by 40 designers. Or more precisely, 39 designers and 1 developer. I talked about how designers and developers can work together better – this was a hugely positive experience.