I lead engineering teams through work that has to land.

Selected work

Chosen for what they show, not when they happened. Named where I can, sector-only where I can't.

1. 01

   HM Government

   Government · statutory

   Deadlines set by legislation, not by negotiation.

   Two examples: a national register released for the date Parliament had fixed, and CefMAT, which standardised UK marine assessments and became a Copernicus Marine Service use case.

   Delivery against statutory deadlines, where technical failure carried legal and regulatory consequences.

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   Statutory and document registers and their supporting services, for departments including Defra and MHCLG (then DCLG). In one case the launch date of a national register had already passed through Parliament before the build began, so the date could not move.

   For Cefas, CefMAT: a web platform for answering marine policy questions about the waters around the UK, including assessing progress towards Good Environmental Status under the Marine Strategy Framework Directive and OSPAR. It brought together large scientific datasets from very different sources – fish surveys, ferry boxes and Copernicus satellite and model data among them – across a wide range of indicators, from eutrophication, oxygen and temperature to the Large Fish Indicator. Long-running statistical queries ran in the background, producing tabular, graphical and map-based outputs in a standard format for national and international submission, with some indicators open to the public and others restricted to authorised users. Featured as a Copernicus Marine Service use case. A relationship maintained for roughly a decade, across several of Cefas's procurement cycles.

   The mechanism by which fifteen governments and the European Union cooperate to protect the marine environment of the North-East Atlantic.

   .NET · SQL Server · ArcGIS · Mapbox · Highcharts · third-party statistical libraries · Copernicus Marine Service data

2. 02

   Optasia

   Fintech · telecoms · global

   Every market its own operator, its own regulator, its own gateway.

   Operational teams ran their own campaigns, to lists of up to ten million, in markets from India to South America, without waiting on engineering.

   Optasia provide microfinance to millions of users over mobile operator networks.

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   Their campaign management platform let operational teams run campaigns themselves: SMS and USSD to subscriber lists of up to ten million, integrated with local messaging gateways at each operator data centre and deployed from India to South America, each market under its own operator and regulatory constraints. Connectivity couldn't be relied on, so messages were queued and retried until they got through – every bit as awkward as it sounds.

   A real-time communication protocol used by mobile networks to let phones use simple interactive services (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data). For example, the menus you get when you dial a code such as *123#.

   A separate Handset Loan Portal let subscribers take handset finance through their mobile provider, funded by microfinance. Campaigns could lead into it.

   Java · Postgres · ActiveMQ · Redis · Docker · SMS and USSD gateway integration

3. 03

   Field data capture

   Agritech · environment · mobile · prototyping

   A survey has to show the surveyor was where they say they were.

   CanopyCheck was adopted globally, including by PepsiCo.

   iOS and Android apps for agronomists, growers and environmental surveyors working out in the field with marginal connectivity.

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   Capture has to work offline and synchronise later, and what comes back has to be trustworthy: readings demonstrably taken in the field, which made "drive-by agronomy" much harder.

   CanopyCheck, built for Landmark Information Group with NIAB and Cambridge University Farm, turned a phone photo into a ground-cover measurement. Tracked weekly through the season, it informed nitrogen, irrigation and yield decisions, and was adopted globally, including by PepsiCo. Crop4Sight, for Greenvale and Produce Solutions, carried canopy imaging forward: yield samples from Bluetooth scales, agroclimatology data from NASA POWER, and machine-learning models benchmarking each growth stage, early enough in the season for growers to act on it. Gaps in the NASA POWER feed were backfilled as data arrived, so predictions tightened quietly rather than visibly breaking.

   Envirocheck Analysis for Landmark: most of the platform's initial API tier and the mobile app on top of it. The same offline-first pattern ran a defect management platform for an electrical maintenance company inspecting critical infrastructure.

   iOS · Android · React Native · .NET · .NET Core · offline capture and deferred sync · machine learning · Azure · cloud APIs · NASA POWER

4. 04

   Wireless telemetry apps

   Industrial instrumentation · BLE

   A transmitter can broadcast to many devices or be paired for calibration, never both.

   Used for monitoring loads held over people's heads.

   Native iOS and Android apps for a UK instrumentation manufacturer, reading wireless load-cell telemetry over Bluetooth Low Energy – the kind of kit used to weigh suspended loads, from lighting and rigging to aircraft.

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   Built native rather than cross-platform deliberately: the Bluetooth behaviour was the product, and an intermediate framework was a risk not worth carrying.

   Users compose dashboards of live tiles driven by expressions they write themselves across multiple transmitters, with unit conversion handled automatically where the source types agree. The engineering sat in that exclusivity: configuring a transmitter has to propagate an offline state through every expression referencing it. No server and no accounts – everything on the device, projects shared as exported definitions, viewing and configuration each PIN-gated. One codebase, several brands.

   Related work took sensor data somewhere with rather less tolerance for error: monitoring systems for power station control rooms, ingesting vibration data from turbine halls onto operator displays and handling exception notification.

   Native iOS (Swift) · native Android (Java) · Bluetooth Low Energy · on-device storage · white-label builds

5. 05

   Online dispute resolution

   Legal · binding arbitration

   Three roles, one dispute, and deadlines that carry legal weight.

   The underlying rules engine survived every procedural change intact.

   A binding online dispute resolution platform for a national law firm, used by members of the public, businesses and solicitors.

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   A claimant logs a dispute, the defendant accepts or rejects resolution, and an appointed decision maker reads both cases and issues a decision – three roles, each with its own view of the same dispute, with an administrator behind them appointing decision makers. Fees were taken through the platform at various points in the process.

   The engineering was in time and locking. Acceptance expires after five days. Response windows run seven calendar days irrespective of weekends and bank holidays. Submissions lock when their window closes and only the decision maker can reopen one, for illness or absence. Every limit that looked like a constant – word counts, document sizes, the length of each window – turned out to be a policy somebody would want to change, so the rules became configuration rather than code. The procedure was revised repeatedly over the life of the project; the state machine underneath it did not have to be.

   .NET · Angular · SQL Server · payment gateway integration

6. 06

   UK mobile short codes

   Telecoms · national infrastructure

   Five competing operators, one authoritative register.

   Run for six years across every UK mobile network operator, through a merger and a major rebuild. Still running.

   For the Short Codes Management Group, a real-time availability checking and reservation service for short codes from Ofcom-approved ranges, across all UK mobile network and virtual network operators.

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   It replaced a fragmented and error-prone process spread across five competing operators when the project began – O2, Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile and Three – each with its own commercial sensitivities about what the others could see. Orange and T-Mobile later merged to form EE, leaving four.

   Aggregators search and request codes; the controlling operator allocates. Reservations expire after three months, with an automated warning before they lapse, so the register stays honest about what is genuinely available.

   I ran it for around six years, through the EE merger and a second major rebuild, then handed it on. It has been maintained and rebuilt since, but the core functionality is the same, and it is still running.

Any of these makes a good first conversation. Pick one and ask me what the hard part turned out to be.