There are some pretty impressive technologies to help organisations deploy rich and engaging web experiences, collect and explore complex datasets, and automate processes. I am always impressed at how far people are able to push these technologies out of the box, with no additional customisation. There comes a point, however, when an organisation needs start to spill outside of the confines of default capabilities that these platforms ship with.

Finding solutions to these challenges is what introduced me to application development 7 years ago, at first within the Google Apps ecosystem, primarily creating composable microservices, and then extending to a Node.js environment, working at a much more atomic level.

For a number of years, I was spending almost every day writing functional logic (bidding algorithms in Google Ads, reporting integrations using Google Analytics’ Reporting and Measurement Protocol APIs, and so on) without writing a single line of HTML or CSS to build a user interface; that was until a good friend of mine encouraged me to give it a razz.

Moving into full-stack development was rather an unexpected change of direction for me. Creating an interface that anybody (not just other nerds/developers) could work with really helped me close the loop for many of my projects; that same friend said to me (and I’m paraphrasing) ‘let people experience your applications their own way’. This has been something of a guiding principle for me since then, and I haven’t looked back!

Now, I work with organisations around the world on a variety of projects, including WordPress, Sitecore, and Shopify theme and integration development, full-featured web application development (from the ground up), web performance and accessibility enhancement, and a plethora of other projects in between.