I grew up in a little village in the West Sussex. In 2009 I swapped the Sussex countryside for bracing sea breezes when I went to Portsmouth to study Computer Game Technology. After failing to get into the video games industry and moving back home, I started working on websites and now call myself a frontend developer. In 2018 I severed my ties to nature altogether and moved to London where I currently live.
At the moment I'm a senior frontend developer working for the Government Digital Service in the GOV.UK Design System team. I've worked in a few places but the ones I thought were most interesting were...
I worked for Shelter for 2 years in their digital campaigns team and later as part of their digital transformation team, converting a huge CMS monolith into a JAMstack project. Whilst I was there I developed a taste for web Design-with-a-capital-D, tech communities of practice and putting my skills towards a positive cause instead of the sale of a product or service.
I've worked for GDS since 2020, existing in that lockdown air gap where I had my interview in an office but worked from home on my first day. I started out working on the principal GOV.UK website where I worked on data.gov.uk, accessibility on GOV.UK and navigation on GOV.UK. A lot of the work I did was subtle, involving under-the-hood changes to improve accessibility or performance, but some more visible things I helped build include an update to the GOV.UK Frontend accordion component and a new GOV.UK homepage (although they've redone my work since I left).
Now I work for the GOV.UK Design System team, helping maintain the visual language and frontend infrastructure of over a thousand digital services. Some things I've built that I'm proud of include Pagination and Exit this Page.
Working here I've learnt a lot about accessibility and the User Centered bit of User Centered Design and care a great deal about both. Speaking of which.
Some things that I'm interested in my professional and personal life.