Experience deep dive

Simpleweb

Developer

This period was broad by design: one team moving between subscription commerce, marketplace booking, public search, open data tooling, AI recommendations, and sustainable product data. The through-line was backend ownership: shaping the technical approach, building the systems, and keeping products shippable while requirements were still moving.

Period
2017 - Apr 2021
Context
Purpose-driven software studio working with startups, clients, and portfolio products across new technologies, product development, and human-centred software.
Focus
Backend leadership, search, payments, data, early-stage product delivery

01

Role shape

Simpleweb was useful experience because the work did not sit inside one product lane. The same role could involve founder discovery, backend architecture, third-party integration, search relevance, production support, and enough product judgement to keep the build honest.

  • Turn loosely defined startup ideas into working product surfaces without hiding behind prototypes.
  • Build pragmatic backend systems that can integrate payment, search, operational tooling, and third-party data.
  • Work directly with founders, product people, designers, and client stakeholders while keeping engineering tradeoffs understandable.
  • Move between stacks quickly without losing sight of maintainability, production support, or user-facing clarity.

02

Project work

Marketplace booking

Space for Arts

Archived source

Public project frame

Online marketplace and booking platform for photo and video production professionals to search, browse, reserve, and book studio spaces.

My contribution

Built the Rails marketplace foundations around studio listings, searchable attributes, booking flows, owner management, and Stripe Connect payment handling.

Work shape

  • Ruby on Rails application work
  • Stripe Connect marketplace payments
  • Elasticsearch-backed studio discovery
  • Complex availability modelling for studio booking constraints
  • Reservation and holding workflows for production spaces
  • Owner-management workflows for listings, attributes, and booking state
  • Ruby on Rails
  • Stripe Connect
  • Elasticsearch
  • Terraform
  • Ansible

Subscription commerce

Different Dog

Archived source

Public project frame

Fresh dog food subscription platform combining a customer web application with subscription billing and fulfilment operations.

My contribution

Led backend delivery for the subscription commerce platform, connecting product, account, billing, fulfilment, and operational concerns into a maintainable system.

Work shape

  • Subscription platform backend leadership
  • Chargebee and ShipStation integration work
  • Rails application architecture for commerce workflows
  • Coordination between product experience and operational fulfilment
  • Ruby on Rails
  • React Native
  • Chargebee
  • ShipStation
  • WordPress
  • Terraform
  • Ansible

Public search

ICAEW Find a Chartered Accountant

Archived source

Public project frame

Search engine for finding registered chartered accountants and firms in England and Wales, replacing a fragmented search experience.

My contribution

Worked on the Elasticsearch-backed search product with a focus on correctness, clear filtering, typo tolerance, and relevance tuning. A large part of the work was direct client collaboration: reviewing real queries together, understanding the exact firms and accountants they expected to see, and tuning the query behaviour until those matches surfaced first.

Work shape

  • Node.js service work
  • Elasticsearch relevance tuning through direct client query review
  • Search result filtering for firms, accountants, and licensed areas
  • Technical integration work against a large external professional dataset
  • Node.js
  • Elasticsearch
  • Terraform
  • AWS Fargate

Sustainable product data

Giki

Archived source

Public project frame

Data platform and mobile application helping consumers understand the impact of supermarket products and find alternatives aligned with their values.

My contribution

Built backend and data-pipeline work for product classification, enrichment, search, and scoring, turning messy product data into something the app could reason about.

Work shape

  • Rails backend and React Native product work
  • Product data parsing and normalisation
  • Elasticsearch-backed discovery
  • Brandbank and Tesco Labs data integration
  • Ruby on Rails
  • React Native
  • Elasticsearch
  • Brandbank
  • Tesco Labs
  • Terraform
  • Ansible

AI recommendations

Envolve Tech

Archived source

Public project frame

Real-time AI and conversational recommendations for ecommerce visitors, centred on Envolve Tech’s convert platform.

My contribution

Worked on AI-assisted classification and recommendation-style product behaviour, helping the convert platform become a more scalable product that could be tested with larger clients.

Work shape

  • Classification and recommendation logic
  • Message and product signal handling
  • Scalable product-platform work for client trials
  • Backend product delivery in a startup-studio context
  • Practical integration work around conversational ecommerce flows
  • AI classification
  • Recommendations
  • Backend systems
  • Terraform
  • Ansible

Open data tooling

OpenActive

Public project frame

Open data and JSON-LD tooling for activity data, including libraries to interact with the standard and test conformance.

My contribution

Worked on Ruby, PHP, and JavaScript libraries plus Jest-based conformance testing, where the value was in interoperability, repeatable validation, and making the standard easier for other engineers to use.

Work shape

  • Open data and JSON-LD modelling
  • Ruby, PHP, and JavaScript library work
  • Jest-based conformance testing
  • Interoperability tooling for external implementers
  • OpenActive
  • JSON-LD
  • Ruby
  • PHP
  • JavaScript
  • Jest
  • Terraform
  • Ansible