My expertise is creating beautiful and efficient user experiences, using the latest technology.
Starting out as a web developer when I was at university, I have almost 20 years experience solving many problems for a variety of small and large companies around the world.
Read more about my specific skills & expertise.
UI/UX Lead - Design and front-end development of superannuation clearing house platform. Angular JS, SCSS, Gulp. Integration with Java Spring based backend API.
Front-end development of web-based Serious Crime Investigation software used by a variety of law enforcement agencies. Technologies used: Angular JS, JSPM, SCSS, Material Design, ES6.
Front-end development of a property search & home loan calculator application. Angular JS, SCSS, Grunt and jQuery. Integrated with a Java Play based backend API.
Front-end development of Java based web application using JQuery, Twitter Bootstrap, Gulp and the Stripes Java Framework.
Design and front-end development of a mobile web application for iOS and Android mobile phones. Angular JS, Coffeescript, Twitter Bootstrap, SCSS.
Design and development of an online HD video conferencing solution. Web and mobile application design and implementation using Flex and Actionscript.
Redesign and implementation of new e-commerce website including custom-built HTML5 component using Angular JS and Google App Engine.
Website design & implementation, social media integration, SEO, CRM integration, graphic design.
Software Development Manager, responsible for the overall planning and execution of all software development projects, as well as operations and personnel in the development/technology division of Biomatters.
Business Analyst & Project Manager for the web development of a social networking platform for football fans.
Java J2EE Development and Business Analysis for various NZ government registries such as the Companies Office, Personal Property Securities Register, Radio Spectrum Management, etc.
Senior Oracle Consultant: Custom database development, web development, Knowledge Manager for Oracle Switzerland.
Multi-tenant superannuation clearinghouse portal
UX prototyping
Instead of doing static UI/UX designs, we decided to create a working prototype of the application. The benefit of our approach was that we were able to not only get design approval from the client, but we could also demonstrate the user experience and get user feedback very early on in the development phase. This allowed us to develop a lot of functionality in a very short period of time, without the need of much refactoring in the later stages. The prototype was coded using Angular JS and SASS, both of which we could reuse for the actual project.
Front-end development
I was responsible for the setup of front-end tooling of the project. Angular JS was a given, but we debated over using ES5, TypeScript or Coffeescript and in the end decided to go for Coffeescript. This was in early 2014, before the Angular team made the decision to use TypeScript. I probably wouldn't make the same decision today, but looking back at it now, Coffeescript was still a good choice. The productivity was very high, and we managed to stick to our coding standards thanks to the whitespace enforcing nature of Coffeescript. Even after 2 years and 12 SuperChoice projects later, our codebase is still neat and manageable. We setup the frontend build pipeline with Gulp, which was later integrated with Maven and run from Bamboo as part of our CI system.
Online HD video conferencing software
UX prototyping
Developing a front-end only prototype of the application allowed us to get very early user experience and potential client feedback without needing to wait for the backend part of the application to be ready. We were able to get the buy-in from our stakeholders and secure funding for subsequent phases of the project thanks to having both desktop and mobile prototypes which showed the planned features and user interactions.
Front-end development
Both mobile and desktop application were developed using the Adobe Flex framework and Actionscript. Later on, parts of the application were redeveloped using Angular JS and WebRTC, with a Flash fallback for older browsers.
Website & application development
Smellycat is an online perfume business that was established in early 2010. The website offers a large range of popular designer perfume brands, with over 1000 products for both men and woman. It existed before I started working with the owner in 2011 and needed enhancements which would have had to be custom developed with the system it was running on. We went out to look for e-commerce platforms that would offer the required functionality and came across Business Catalyst. After an initial proof-of-concept, we decided it was a great platform which provided all the functionality that was required for the business without adding complicated steps to the process.
Website Implementation
The website has been implemented completely from scratch with new templates and stylesheets. The homepage underwent a redesign to include a 'slideshow' with the latest product announcements. Other functionality includes: Newsletter signup form, refer a friend, customer registration and a new blog.
Email Marketing
Business Catalyst comes with built-in email marketing capabilities including 10,000 emails per month, which means the owner does not have to use a separate system and pay per email to reach out to the customer base.
CRM
The CRM capabilities of Business Catalyst are limited, but in most cases they are actually sufficient to run an online business. The existing customer database was exported from the old SQL Server database and converted to the Business Catalyst format where it was imported without any problems.
Product Database
All existing products were exported from the old system and imported into Business Catalyst. Since the setup of BC is different from the old system, we had to re-categorise and re-group all products and create related products manually. The nice thing is that the whole product catalog can be exported to an Excel spreadsheet and then re-imported again. This is very handy for global prices changes, which wasn't possible with the old system.
In 2013, the system was expanded to improve the product search functionality. Business Catalyst did not offer the required product filter functionality, so I developed a custom solution including a Java web application that runs on Google app engine, and a new Angular JS driven frontend to filter products.
