About

Intro

Hello there! Welcome to my personal site - the home of my thoughts and ideas on the latest trends in software engineering for the web and mobile.

I'm based in Cardiff, UK - where I've lived for over the past 10 years.

A little about myself...

Since graduating from Cardiff University with a 1st class degree in Computer Science, I've worked in the web industry.

Over the last 6 years, I've honed my skills across several platforms and languages to reach the level of Senior Lead Developer. My long term goal is to become a CTO / Director for a software house.

I pride myself on being socialable developer and prefer a face to face conversation than one conducted over IM.

I follow the ethos of learning something new everyday which I think is essential for success into today's web industry.

Writing

It has always been an ambitious of mine to write a book and during 2013 I decided to start this journey. I wrote an article on optimizing developer workflow, using Yeoman, for the popular web magazine .NET.

In 2014, I will be co-authoring an open source book, The Little Book of Modern Front-end Tooling, with some of the best minds in the web industry.

Co-author of Yeoman's first CodeLab with Addy Osmani and Pearl Chen.

In 2015 in partnership with Apress I've published my first book Pro Grunt.js. Pro Grunt.js gets you quickly up-to-speed with this popular JavaScript-based task runner. Each chapter focused on a group of plugins that can be used to optimise your developer workflow.

Community

I pride myself on mentoring developers around me and giving back to the community. I've developed, and co-developed, several open source projects recently.

Most notable projects are Gruntjs plugins for automating tasks such as running PHPUnit, Cucumber and Google PageSpeed Insights.

To see a full list of the projects visit the projects page or my Github profile.

Speaking

I'm always keen to share my experiences and I love the opportunity to talk on topics I'm passionate about.

I've previously spoken at:

• WordPress User Wales #1 November 2011
• WordPress User Wales: RWD February 2013
• unified.diff: Optimising your workflow with Yeoman! July 2013
• Port80 Localhost: CSS Preprocessors: LESS is more or look SASS-y trying August 2013

Employment

Four years of my professional career was spent at Box UK, an excellant software company based in Cardiff. Whilst at Box UK, I lead on several medium to large projects for financial, leisure and education sectors.

With the salient growth in the mobile market, I've spent the past 3 years further my skillset to include native mobile application. During 2012, I collaborated on a project to deliver an application for both iOS and Android marketplace for a major UK retailer.

This project was closely followed by a project to develop an iPad application for an international consumer goods company which was showcased during at their conference in Singapore at the tail end of 2013.

Currently, I'm a Senior Developer at BBC Future Media for Travel News product, leading a team of 4 developers. This is a new opportunity that I started in September 2012.

Aside from the above, I have also worked passionately with small / medium businesses over the past 24 months to development and deliver software solutions to enable them to meet the needs of their clients.

To see more details of my education and employment history, please visit my LinkedIn profile.

The future...

I'm always looking to further myself, learn new skills and tackle new challenges. During 2014, I plan to study towards a couple of courses through coursera to further my development skills. Alongside this, I plan to develop my first product which should hopefully launch late 2014.