Shipping since 1999.Still on the latest version.

Paramount Visas · Business Systems Engineer

• Changed

  Moved from studio development into business systems engineering, in a regulated environment where reliability and traceability matter more than novelty.

• Changed

  How the code gets written. Models draft against a written brief, hard constraints and a design system they cannot drift from. CI and I review. What they cannot manage, I write.

• Added

  Waypoint, Vault and a rebuilt paramountvisas.com. See recent builds below.

• Added

  Automations that take manual work, duplication and operational risk off the team.

• Added

  Shared CI, a versioned design system and a few MCP servers, so both apps ship the same way and the AI tooling has something safe to talk to.

• Fixed

  Inconsistent data, tooling and documentation across CRM, document management, task tracking and comms platforms.

• Note

  Also the primary technical point of contact and day-to-day internal IT. Someone has to standardise the laptops.

Switch Studios · Senior Developer

• Added

  GitHub Copilot rolled out across the studio, with integration guides and working practices most of the team still use.

• Added

  Static analysis, automation and quality gates across the studio's pipelines.

• Changed

  Became the studio's senior technical advisor, bridging leadership, development and QA, and representing the technical view at management meetings and conferences.

• Added

  Weekly developer sessions, plus mentoring through code review, workflow improvements and new standards.

Switch Studios · Client Developer

• Added

  HTML5 casino table games for Microgaming, in TypeScript and PixiJS: roulette, blackjack, baccarat, sic bo and their many variants, tuned for constrained mobile hardware.

• Changed

  Core engine architecture, planned with the technical architect and carried across the development and QA teams.

• Added

  Mentoring L1 developers, with code review as a standing responsibility rather than a favour.

• Changed

  Progress, complications and timeline changes taken to stakeholders in plain English, before they became surprises.

• Note

  Regulatory compliance reviews on every release.

FLOvate Solutions · Lead Web Developer

• Changed

  A short leadership role over web projects and technical delivery. Think of it as a hotfix branch.

Wheatley · Developer

• Added

  .NET systems for gas, electricity and water utilities: smart meter management, workforce tools and backend integrations.

• Added

  Continuous integration and delivery with unit and automated UI tests, inside an ISO 27001-certified company. First proper taste of a tightly regulated industry.

• Fixed

  Reported bugs reproduced and isolated with the support team before a work item was raised.

2DEVS · Co-founder, evenings and weekends

• Added

  A two-person freelance studio with a friend on design and frontend and me on everything behind it, run around the day job.

• Added

  Bespoke sites and systems for a dozen small businesses, an Umbraco build, a nopCommerce shop, and the 2015 Student Gems rebuild, maintained into 2018.

• Added

  A prototype intranet and CRM for a visa consultancy. The owner passed on it. Ten years later, see v26.01.0.

• Removed

  2DEVS itself, dissolved in June 2025 after eleven years. Side hustles have lifecycles too.

kwiboo · Developer

• Added

  Distributed systems for a large online pharmacy, plus work for Sony, Mitsubishi Electric, Sega and Xchanging. Eighty percent development, twenty percent keeping it all running.

• Added

  Zero-downtime deploys to live systems with immediate rollback on failure. Standard practice ever since.

• Added

  KnockoutJS and MVVM, SignalR, Windows services, message queues, AngularJS, Web API, single-page apps, PhoneGap, Sass and LESS. Roughly everything, roughly at once.

• Changed

  Client specifications broken down into costs and timelines, then delivered on them. Self-managed from the first sprint.

• Deprecated

  jQuery, in favour of Knockout and then Angular. Still fond of it.

• Note

  Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer, Web Applications, 2014. Renewed twice, then quietly retired along with the acronym.

Rade Digital · Senior Web Developer

• Changed

  Rolled back to Rade, in a more senior role.

• Added

  HTML5, CSS3 and responsive design, championed across client e-commerce sites while IE7 was still on the support list.

• Added

  QA testing, source control and bug tracking as standard practice. The first process I ever introduced to a team.

• Added

  Git. Just started using it, according to my 2012 CV.

• Fixed

  A locked-down core platform, by reshaping its pages with jQuery and AJAX after they had rendered. Not proud. Very effective.

• Fixed

  Christmas peak load for e-commerce clients, with load testing and a lot of profiling.

• Removed

  Internet Explorer 6 support.

Student Gems · Technical Manager

• Changed

  From their long-time freelancer to head of everything technical, after the company took angel investment.

• Added

  Servers, email, firewall, hosting, contractors and all new development. One person, a lot of hats.

• Added

  A content-managed bulk email system on HTML and plain-text templates with a dynamic SQL merge. A mail merge, in 2009, by hand.

• Changed

  Classic ASP forms rebuilt as jQuery and AJAX wizards with remote geocoding. Most of the rest rewritten in valid XHTML and CSS. Tables were for data again.

Rade New Media · Web Developer

• Added

  E-commerce sites on the RadeTrade platform for Multiyork, Rapid Electronics, Hawkin's Bazaar and the World Land Trust, among others. PSD in, working shop out.

• Added

  Payment gateways: SagePay, PayPal, WorldPay and Protx. Fulfilment and CRM integrations with Maginus and Khaos Control.

• Changed

  More ASP.NET, co-writing an intranet for the largest e-commerce customer.

• Note

  Two Arcaysis customers followed me out of the door as freelance clients. A good sign, I decided.

Arcaysis · Developer

• Added

  Core work on a content management and e-commerce engine that was mostly SQL: stored procedures, triggers, transactions and metadata, running shops doing thousands of orders a day.

• Changed

  Learned relational design and database performance properly, in T-SQL, the way you only learn it when the orders are real.

• Note

  Contracted out to Rade New Media in 2006 to teach their team the system. Ended up staying.

• Note

  Also trading on the side as RB Web Developments: around thirty small sites, forum setups, online stores and, according to the services page, vinyl-to-CD transfers.

2Cs · Web Developer

• Added

  Dozens of dynamic sites in Classic ASP, SQL and early ASP.NET, in a team of three developers and six designers. Accessibility guidelines on most of them.

DKNI · Software Developer

• Added

  Access front-ends on SQL Server, and VBA that imported spreadsheets, converted them to CSV and FTP'd them elsewhere. Linked servers and distributed transactions included.

• Note

  Short stint. The company was acquired the following year.

AfterTwelve.com · Between jobs, on my own network

• Changed

  A year and a half back on the Sale Computer Systems sites full time (see v99.08.0), with AfterTwelve getting most of the attention.

• Added

  A dating site built from scratch: bespoke CMS, membership system and card payments through a real merchant account.

• Note

  It got real traction. Closed in 2004. Not a code issue.

NHS Direct · Web Developer

• Changed

  A static HTML site converted to dynamic ASP with SQL Server behind it.

• Added

  W3C accessibility standards, followed at all times. The NHS insisted, and it stuck.

Mirago · Web Developer

• Added

  The only full-time web developer on a very busy UK search engine.

• Changed

  Junior web developer to web developer in week three.

• Changed

  The entire site, from PerlScript to VBScript. It was 2000. It made sense at the time.

• Added

  Hardware and software rollouts alongside the sysadmins when the site needed it. Everyone did everything.

• Note

  First job title with the words web developer in it.

Sale Computer Systems · Co-founder and developer

• Added

  An early e-commerce site for computer peripherals and a PC build service, through a company I set up with family. Taking card payments online meant persuading a bank, not adding a script tag.

• Changed

  Andover TownCentral, commercialised. Same forum, now with adverts.

• Added

  A small content network: TeenScene for teenagers, NappyRash for new parents, AfterTwelve for dating, with our own banner ad platform running across all of them.

• Added

  TastyTones: ringtones, polyphonics and logos for the Nokia 3310 generation. It made money. The syndication partner made more.

• Note

  Dissolved in 2003. All of it Classic ASP on one Windows box. I still have the IIS logs.

Andover TownCentral · Pre-release

• Added

  A community site for my home town, built while working through Sams Teach Yourself ASP in 21 Days, then Active Server Pages Unleashed. ASP 2 and Access 97.

• Added

  Forum, chat, classifieds, local news, restaurants, churches, pet rescue, recipes, and a high-score table for Pac-Man, Space Invaders and Snake.

• Note

  Initial commit. No tests. We were young.