Modulor / Watamusic

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​Watamusic is a digital distribution platform aimed at independent music labels. The project is a long-running startup, developed in association with French music distributor and publisher Modulor.

The project is a multi-faceted, multi-service modern scalable, distributed system which encompasses digital content management, physical transportation of assets to digital service providers (eg Spotify, Apple) and trends performance reporting, as well as tools to help with promotion.

As CTO, I'm responsible for the full architecture and development of every level of the system. The system comprises the following:

• A core/API service and API handling data integrity, built on Laravel in PHP.
• A front-end interface built on React in TypeScript.
• A delivery system, handling physical transport of assets, built in Golang.
• WIP A trends ecosystem, handling the processing of reporting data from the DSPs in real time, this is built around a Kafka streaming platform with Golang data producers and KSQL transformers.

• Client: Startup
• Date: January 2020
• Role: CTO

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Lanyard

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Lanyard is an online service for recording a journal of your live music memories. It was the product of a 24-hour hack organised alongside the Way Out West music festival in Gothenburg, Sweden. Whilst what we built in those 24 hours differed massively from the application we launched, we prototyped many of the concepts that would form the basis of the final product. The full service was built in our free time and launched a few months later in November 2012, coinciding with the Warped Tour UK, a music festival in London. The service continued to be built on and developed regularly well into 2013.

I was one of two developers on the project. We were both responsible for both front-end and back-end and tended to tackle a wide variety of tasks. The back-end pulls content from a number of APIs including Echonest, last.fm, setlist.fm. While the front end plugs into Twitter and also a Lanyard Spotify API, to enable users to listen to the setlist of gigs again. The basic concept is that users search for gigs (pulled from last.fm, we do our best to get as many gigs as possible), check in and then are able to add photos and comments to the gig and could see what others were adding.

The service gathered a respectable following and had very high engagement rates, with users frequently trying to recall their full gig history soon after signing up. It was an interesting enough concept to get the commercial attention of AEG Live and Seatwave.

• Client: N/A
• Date: November 2012
• Role: Co-founder and developer

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Lee e-commerce Site

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This project ran alongside the Wrangler e-commerce project. And unlike most other projects, we weren’t responsible for delivering a full site build in this case of either. Rather we were tasked with designing the full, responsive sites, while another company would perform the build. Given the difficulty in communicating responsive and interactive design across country borders, it was decided we would deliver fully designed, interactive and responsive prototypes so, rather than be told what to develop, the external company could see what they had to develop.

I took the role of technical lead on the project which required me setting up a bespoke framework that was capable of generating flat HTML pages, whilst still maintaining the ability to develop in an object-oriented way and with a build process for the image and CSS generation. Subsequent to that I managed both technical implementations and also assisted on the front-end development of the Lee build. After each package was delivered, I would write a technical handover document to cover anything that the prototypes couldn’t and would liaise with the developers in the other company.

In the end our prototypes were deemed good enough to make up the vast bulk of the front-end code.

• Client: Lee Jeans
• Date: September 2014
• Role: Lead and front-end developer

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Blue Note Spotify App

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Winning a silver CLIO award in the Music Digital/Social category, the Blue Note Spotify app was described by Billboard as ‘dazzling’ and received plaudits from Rolling Stone and the LA Times. The app provided multiple entry points into Blue Note’s extensive discography of more than 75 years. Users could browse the catalogue by date, style, artist, instrument and even by which songs were sampled in more contemporary tracks.

I was the sole developer working on the project, building the back-end in PHP and MySQL to provide a CMS for quick data entry and serve JSON files to the app. Given the large quantities of data that needed to be manually entered into the CMS. This part of the application was designed by myself and was completely bespoke and tailored to the needs of the CMS user. The front end was built in HTML and javascript, as is the case with all Spotify client apps. This differed from many web applications in that Spotify apps are effectively single page applications with javascript controlling the majority of the app’s functions and being intrinsically weaved into the Spotify API, allowing seamless in-app playback of music.

• Client: Blue Note
• Date: September 2012
• Role: Sole Developer

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Simply Be Meme Generator

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​The Simply Be Meme Generator was a quick project designed to engage Simply Be customers in their #SimplyBeReal campaign by allowing them to create their own meme image. The project is a front-end application that allows users to add an image or their choosing and customising it with some text and a border. They would then be able to share the image on their social channels.

The application uses KnockoutJS to handle the front-end state and user input, allowing the preview area to be updated instantly with little effort. The preview itself is generated using the canvas HTML element to draw the image onto the page (accommodating for various image orientations) and another canvas element to write the text onto that image. These elements are combined in the browser and sent to the server where the image is combined with the border (to reduce bandwidth from the user) and saved to allow sharing to be handled.

I worked on this project with Jet Design and Marketing.

• Client: Jet Design and Marketing/Simply Be
• Date: September 2015
• Role: Sole Developer

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UNSHACKLED.com

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UNSHACKLED.com is a site that tries to free mobile customers from expensive and confusing mobile contracts by selling phones with financing options where the APR is clear and repayment plan fixed.

My role was initially to implement a CRM system that would interact with the distributed Scala application that handled the order/customer management. We implemented a self-hosted instance of OroCRM, a PHP Symfony-based open source CRM. The successful implementation required bespoke implementation of data readers and models for representing parts of the data such as contract and finance details.

Once launched, I worked in the front-end team to implement new features on the Angular-based consumer-facing website.

• Client: UNSHACKLED.com
• Date: May 2016
• Role: CRM/Front End Developer

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Wrangler e-commerce Site

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This project ran alongside the Lee e-commerce project. And unlike most other projects, we weren’t responsible for delivering a full site build in this case of either. Rather we were tasked with designing the full, responsive sites, while another company would perform the build. Given the difficulty in communicating responsive and interactive design across country borders, it was decided we would deliver fully designed, interactive and responsive prototypes so, rather than be told what to develop, the external company could see what they had to develop.

I took the role of technical lead on the project which required me setting up a bespoke framework that was capable of generating flat HTML pages, whilst still maintaining the ability to develop in an object-oriented way and with a build process for the image and CSS generation. Subsequent to that I managed both technical implementations and also assisted on the front-end development of the Lee build. After each package was delivered, I would write a technical handover document to cover anything that the prototypes couldn’t and would liaise with the developers in the other company.

In the end our prototypes were deemed good enough to make up the vast bulk of the front-end code.

• Client: Wrangler Jeans
• Date: September 2014
• Role: Lead and front-end developer

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Albumcards

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I was brought onto the albumcards project as support when the site transformed from a physical retail product into a full online service for sending personalised gift card-cum-album to absolutely anyone. Think iTunes meets Moonpig!

My role was to begin the development of the new e-commerce platform in Laravel, which would run alongside some of the old services. I architected and built some of the core features: the basket, the checkout - integrated with the Stripe API, the card customisation, the PDF integration - ultimately to send to the printers, some reporting to record labels and the Official Chart Company and the services for commissioning unique codes so the recipient could actually claim their album. The latter also needed to be fully compatible with the legacy system so people could still use the old cards.

The service launched in October 2014 and is sending cards out to happy customers!

• Client: N/A
• Date: October 2014
• Role: Developer

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