✨ Showcase

TrueNorth is the only growth marketing platform to plan and track marketing in one place, with everything and everyone focused on the goal.

Built from the ground up using Next, Apollo, GraphQL and Postgres this high performance marketing SaaS was a really meaty project, and a lot of fun to bring to life. There is a lot going on behind the scenes to keep track of campaigns across lots of different providers like Google, Facebook and LinkedIn ad platforms, as well as forecasting, planning and reporting tools.

Serene is a macOS app that gives you productivity superpowers by layering three proven techniques to boost focus.

I arrived mid-way through the team producing Serene, which was being worked on by a third party. A lot of the bones were put together, an Electron app with some custom JS framework and a macOs proxy for managing application states. My work centered around bringing more reporting, interactivity, and sharing capability to the app. Firstly moving it to utilising React so that we could quickly implement standard charting libraries - as well as having a web-version. I produced a backend using Firebase which gave us real time sync across teams, which I think was a first for an Electron app at that time. I also worked with the team to skill them up, and started pulling all of the development inhouse

Serene continues to have a serious cult following, inspiring thousands of people to write, program and design to the very best of their abilities - with no distractions!

Diffblue Cover helps developers deliver higher quality code, faster, accelerating your adoption of Shift Left and DevOps.

As well as being massively involved in the core product, I took a small team along with me on a smaller project to produce a 'playground' for the core technology of the business. Basically, we hit a point where only very large enterprises could work with us - because of the complexity of the product - and I pushed the CEO to make something lightweight and free that anyone could use to better understand the technology - which was AI that generates unit tests. Playground was the outcome of that project, and was a web app where you could paste or write a Java class file and we would run a trimmed down version of our main product to generate tests for it.

This project was massively technical. The core technology was a beast to run, and needed lots of cores and memory, as well as full access to the entire codebase in order to better understand it. So it was far from straightforward to get this to run on Lambda functions with a single class file - but me and my ragtag team of 3 developers did! We utilised AWS, and Lambda to keep the costs manageable and 'capped', with a completely bespoke serverless backend that worked with buckets and AWS Cognito - which was still in beta but we had very close links to AWS who wanted us to take it for a spin. The frontend was all React, with a lot of interesting animations and transitons to try to keep a high wow factor.

Sadly this project was taken offline, but I still love it.