I’m a mid-senior full-stack engineer, about fifteen years in. Most of that has been JavaScript, from Angular and React through to the servers and AWS behind them. I’ve worked across a wide range of sectors, including gaming, media companies, medical tech, construction, banking, fashion wholesale, and insurance. I work well on my own, and just as well in a room with the people who have to live with what gets shipped.
I learn by building. I’m potentially neurodivergent, which shapes how I work. I like to understand things from first principles. This gives me a greater appreciation for how the parts fit together.
I start with the functionality and the methodology — the mechanics and the ethos behind everything. I refine the idea until I'm able to extract this intention into its most aesthetically pleasing form.
I find hands on experience and reading from a variety of different sources useful for this.
The projects below are the resulting explorations alongside my tenure as a developer. Each one started as a question I wanted answered.
A place to come back to. UmindU (you-mind-you) is a product, and a business by the same name, formed in 2016. I’m working toward a launch. It’s where psychology and software meet, for people who think in a similar way and need help taking energy, sleep, nutrition, motivation, and day-to-day consistency up a level. The tools come out of my own study of neurodivergent traits.
A small responsive site: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in S3, with the domain pointed here through Route 53.
A breadboard timer on an ATmega328P: RTC, buzzer, OLED, and four buttons that always mean the same thing. Left and right move between the 25, 5, and 30 minute timers. Up and down step in and out. Right starts, left pauses, and a short tune plays when time is up. The case is still a Fusion 360 sketch.
One task at a time. An animated clock, status pips, alert sounds, and a small Kanban board, with a free page and a paid one. I drew the artwork in Sketch, turned it into SVG, and animated a character whose movement comes from Sunshine Buddies. It deploys to EC2 from the Puppet project below.
Sunshine Buddies MEAN.JS on GitHub meanjs.org Pomodoro Technique Sketch
One command for a Debian or Ubuntu box: hostname, git, rbenv, nginx, Let’s Encrypt, MongoDB, and a MEAN app. Tested with Vagrant before it ever touched a real server.
A to-do app for iOS 3. Slide the illustrated header to change context, then tick off each SMART attribute before the task is allowed to exist.
I left shared hosting, rented a Linode, and learned the server the hard way: iptables, nginx in front of Mongrel, Capistrano, Rails, and Postfix talking to Gmail. The domain itself took years to get hold of.
My first project. I wasn’t in the industry yet. I’d left university, was working in retail, and wrote it so the coding wouldn’t fade. C# sat well next to the C++ I’d been learning. It was the poker craze, around 2005 to 2007. I’d started playing just before it blew up, and before the US moved to shut casual play down.
This is a work in progress. Check back from time to time to check on the progress of these projects.
