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Remote.com

Sun, 01 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +1000

I joined the Remote.com AI and Knowledge Management team in 2023. On this team I was technical lead for a number of projects:

Knowledge Management & AI Governance Data Pipeline
AI Support Chatbot
AI Support Email Auto-Responder
AI Evaluation Framework
Ask An Expert (backend)

Global Entertainment Company

Sun, 01 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +1000

I began consulting for a global entertainment company in 2021. I lead the project to restructure and dismantle a Kafka-based event-sourcing system costing the business tens of thousands of pounds every quarter in infrastructure costs.

SplitFire!

Fri, 01 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +1000

SplitFire is an independent game I released which allows 2 players to battle head-to-head on a single mobile device.

Wi5

Mon, 01 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +1000

I joined Wi5 in 2018, and worked as Tech Lead working predominately on their architecture, AWS infrastructure, and building their Point-of-Sale integrations and payment processing systems. Wi5 was a POS integrated Order & Pay system for the hospitality industry. Wi5 has since pivotted to focus on payment processing and renamed to “Onvi”.

Immerse VR

Tue, 01 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +1000

Immerse is a VR startup based in London, UK. Immerse provides an enterprise virtual reality CMS and Unity SDK . I joined the company in 2017 as their lead DevOps Engineer to lead the company’s effort in becoming a global VR platform.

Quiqup B2B Ordering UI

Mon, 01 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +1000

Quiqup is a realtime delivery platform.

Quiqup provides a customer-facing iOS application which allows customers to order from any restaurant or store in London and get it delivered within minutes.

Quiqup Last Mile Delivery Platform

Sun, 01 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +1000

Quiqup is a realtime delivery platform.

Quiqup provides a customer-facing iOS application which allows customers to order from any restaurant or store in London and get it delivered within minutes.

In addition, Quiqup provides a B2B web application and a RESTful API for integrating their delivery platform into any eCommerce system.

I joined Quiqup in 2015 as a senior full-stack developer as we were pivoting from a customer-facing application, to a more enterprise offering; as well as expanding into Dubai and other locations.

Grouper Mobile App & Backend

Thu, 01 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +1000

Grouper is an “Offline Social Club” who joined YCombinator in 2012.

In 2013 Grouper decided to pivot towards a mobile-first experience, and I was brought onboard contracting as a senior full-stack developer.

I worked under the guidance of Tom Blomfield, Tom Brown and Michael Waxman to deliver the backend services that powered the platform.

Grouper Experiments

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Grouper is an “Offline Social Club” who joined YCombinator in 2012.

In 2013 Grouper decided to pivot towards a mobile-first experience, and I was brought onboard contracting as a senior full-stack developer.

I worked under the guidance of Tom Blomfield, Tom Brown and Michael Waxman to deliver the backend services that powered the platform.

As part of an ongoing initiative, we frequenlty built off-shoot products and experiments in order to test our assumptions about our market. Each iteration went from conception to market in less than 2 weeks.

Elixir Phoenix Development

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Elixir Phoenix is a powerful framework for building web applications. It is a modern, functional, and performant framework that is easy to learn and use.

Elixir and Phoenix excel at highly-concurrent, real-time applications. They are a great fit for building web applications that require low-latency and high-availability.

Cloud Cost Optimization

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Cloud costs can be a major expense for businesses. I can help you reduce your cloud costs by up to 90% by identifying and optimizing areas of your infrastructure that are costing you money.

GitLab Orchestration

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Gitlab has quickly become the de-facto standard for code building sophisticated CI/CD pipelines, due to it’s flexible nature and diverse feature set. However, managing Gitlab workflows across multiple projects and teams can be challenging. This is where I can help.

Kubernetes Administration

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Kubernetes is the platform for buliding platforms. In the right hands, it is an incredibly powerful and versitile tool for building scalable, resilient, and efficient systems.

Unfortunately, Kubernetes comes with a steep learning curve and requires a lot of time and effort to master. If you need a certified Kubernetes Administrator, get in touch.

Terraform Automation

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Terraform is a powerful tool for managing infrastructure as code. It is a modern, functional, and performant framework that is easy to learn and use.

Flexible Config

Mon, 10 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

FlexibleConfig promotes good OOP design, and the separation of logic and configuration in your Ruby classes.

FlexibleConfig allows you to set class constants cleanly in ruby with the heirarchical structure and clean workflow of YML config, without sacrificing the flexibility and immediacy of ENVironment variables.

CoCoach

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Cocoach is a business coaching and business management application for real-time collaboration, document creation and project management.

Developer Workflow Optimization

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Has your development velocity plateaued? Are you struggling to keep up with the demands of your project? I can help you optimize your developer workflow to improve productivity.

Choosing Phoenix LiveView

Sun, 16 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

If I need to get a project to market quickly, Phoenix LiveView is my go-to framework.

Elixir LiveView is incredible, and an alluring choice for software leaders looking to develop applications super fast. However, in recent experience, I’ve seen teams hit some pitfalls.

The trick is to understand what Elixir LiveView excels at, and what it doesn’t.

TL;DR: LiveView is perfect for internal tools and simple apps. Skip it for complex UIs, offline-first apps, or if your team doesn’t know Elixir well.

A Game of Thrones: LCG

Tue, 23 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Analyses the Meta for A Game of Thrones: Living Card Game and returns the best sets to buy.

Method

Uses data pulled from the following websites:

Cards & Set Database: https://thronesdb.com/api/

Meta Statistics: http://thestonedrum.com/#/overview

Considerations

Considers agenda cards ~3x more important than a normal card. Considers plot cards ~2x more important than a normal card. Considers popular neutrals and non-loyal cards slightly more important (as they can be used in more decks). Considers older chapter packs worth less (they become obsolete after 4 years).

8 Manoeuvres to Make You the Perfect Git Citizen

Sat, 30 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

One of the greatest features of the GIT version control system is its ability to rewrite local history before pushing it to a remote repository.

Why I Believe Rails is Still Relevant in 2019

Wed, 06 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

You might have read the infamous blog posts titled “Rails is Dead”, but I have seen development teams flounder over and over again when they try and reinvent the wheel using NodeJS on the backend.

21 Commandments for Greenfield Development

Mon, 04 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The “greenfield” project is known by developers as a productivity Nirvana. It is a beautiful place where there is no legacy, no bugs and endless possibilities. It is also littered with mines.

I’ve recently seen a number of anti-patterns around the creation and early growth new projects, and thought I’d summarize the anti-patterns I’d seen in the past as a guide for developers to avoid these common pitfalls.

Continuous Integration Woes With Unity 3d

Sat, 08 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I love the Unity framework. It’s my go-to framework for games development, and a cornerstone of the technology my company Immerse builds.

Cloud Native London

Tue, 04 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Members of the Cloud Native London Meetup had the pleasure tonight to hear some amazing speakers.

The first talk was called Switching Horses Midstream: The Challenges of Migrating 150+ Microservices to Kubernetes where Sarah Wells, the Technical Director for the Financial Times spoke about their migration from disperate Docker containers to a microservice architecture orchestrated with Kubernetes.

The FT’s content platform team put our first containers live in mid-2015 and migrated the rest of our services over by April 2016. We weren’t using Kubernetes but in late 2016, we decided we wanted to benefit from the work other people were doing and switched over to Kubernetes. We had 150+ microservices and needed to keep the existing platform running in parallel.

String.Chars Protocol for Elixir PIDs

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I recently did a live coding session on a 3d audio server built in Elixir.

This project involves quite a complicated supervision tree where GenServers are created and destroyed dynamically based on users joining a room and moving around.

As such this requires in-depth logging of processes in the application.

Live Coding a 3D Chat Server in Elixir

Mon, 27 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

In this live-coding session I work on an Elixir server built to support huge numbers of users chatting in 3d.

In these sessions we build a supervision tree based on the following architecture:

Surgeons Who Won't Sew

Mon, 06 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Then she gets up and leaves. The patient is still on dialysis, still bleeding in places, and their internal organs are still on show for everyone else in the room. The patient’s immediate future is secure, but eventually they are still going to bleed to death.

As a DevOps engineer, perhaps one of the best things you can do for an engineering team is to empower them to write and utilize tests. This may be as simple as setting them up with a hosted CircleCI account, or might be as involved as setting up an entire build pipeline on an internal CI system like TeamCity, AWS Codebuild or Jenkins.

Deploying a Static S3 Website With Terraform

Sun, 22 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

In this video we will set up an automatic deployment CI/CD pipeline which deploys our static website to S3.

We will then create a Terraform project which will orchestrate resources in AWS, and create an S3 bucket, and IAM user to use in our pipeline.

Qubula Puzzle Game

Tue, 06 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Qubula is a puzzle game where puzzles are generated from a gene and a random seed.

An Elixir program generates the puzzles, and outputs level files in JSON.

The frontend of the game is built in ReactJS, with the frontend state management written using Mobx-state-tree.

Ruby Module Introspection

Tue, 26 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The AST Guidelines ruby gem gem analyses Ruby module heirarchies to ensure you do not violate bounded context design.

A bounded context is a concept of domain driven design which dictates the design of complex software systems.

Ruby Service Objects

Sun, 24 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The Ruby on Rails framework often gets a lot of hate over the years.

Rails makes it easy to get up and running quickly. Unfortunately, its beginner-friendly approach leaves you high and dry months later when you have thousands of lines of code.

Rails applications of this type are often referred to as Rails monoliths.

One of the best ways to refactor and save an aging Rails monolith, is to extract service objects.

In these videos we create a “base service” which allows us to easily build service objects with powerful error handling and chaining capabilities.

Your Production Environment Isn't Always So Important

Thu, 19 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Until you have found product-market fit, your production environment is often just another test environment. It’s not testing your code, it’s testing your customers.

At a previous startup company, we had a few hundred thousand users. Not all that many, but enough to get some interesting data and be in a position to use it to optimize the business. We had previously built a recommendation engine in Elasticsearch which all our users were piped through, and we user it to provide daily recommendations based on our most recent data. It wasn’t all that complex at first, and served us really well for a while.

API Buddy

Sun, 28 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

API Buddy is a DSL for defining stubbed RESTful API endpoints, and generating documentation and tests based on the schema.

RSpec Describe Method

Sat, 21 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

RSpec Describe Method is a ruby gem that provides a shorthand for testing specific methods of classes.

It supports both instance methods and class methods, with or without arguments.

Active Hash

Sun, 23 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

ActiveHash is a simple base class that allows you to use a ruby hash as a readonly datasource for an ActiveRecord-like model.

ActiveHash assumes that every hash has an :id key, which is what you would probably store in a database. This allows you to seamlessly upgrade from ActiveHash objects to full ActiveRecord objects without having to change any code in your app, or any foreign keys in your database.

It also allows you to use #has_many and #belongs_to (via belongs_to_active_hash) in your AR objects.

ActiveHash can also be useful to create simple test classes that run without a database - ideal for testing plugins or gems that rely on simple AR behavior, but don’t want to deal with databases or migrations for the spec suite.

RSpec Situations

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Adds a super simple method to describe RSpec situations in terms of smaller situation blocks.

Define a situation with the ‘situation’ method. Add a symbol key to identify the situation, and add an optional description if you like, and pass in a block creating the situation.

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

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Contact

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000