/ about
I'm a software engineer who spent almost 8 years in a marketing agency.
Not as a contractor. Not on secondment. Full time, one company, from the inside. In an agency of over 45 people, marketing and development sat close together. I ended up working across both sides.
/ the pattern
Most of the time that meant getting existing tools to talk to each other.
If nothing out there could do the job, I'd build it. The point was making the whole thing work as one system.
It started with a small HubSpot project. Making a form smarter. Dropdown search fields, hidden values that changed based on what the user selected, pulling data from a completely different system. Not glamorous, but it worked.
And that became the pattern: someone has a problem, the existing tools can't quite do it, I figure out how to make them do it.
That pattern kept repeating. Small projects turned into bigger ones. I started as a developer and ended up running the development and digital advertising teams.
/ the work
Over 8 years I delivered 40+ websites and built 10+ internal tools.
One of the bigger projects was an enterprise integration that synced 300,000+ contacts between a CRM and a legacy system. I learned the integration platform from zero and shipped it in three months. The client's sales and marketing teams had been working off disconnected data for years.
Another was an infrastructure overhaul for a corporate client. Their previous setup had fragmented vendors, and a security incident where nobody could trace the root cause. I led the RFP, designed the cloud architecture, coordinated penetration testing, and maintained the system for three years.
Alongside the client work, I audited and fixed tracking for 20+ organisations. When off-the-shelf tools didn't fit or couldn't be trusted, I built our own. Quick to build, did exactly what we needed, and we knew exactly what was in the code.
Along the way, I mentored junior members into senior roles and became the person pushing AI adoption before the rest of the team saw the point. Showing people how to use it for research, content, and code. Not as magic, but as a tool.
/ what i believe
I've always believed there's no best method. There's always a better one. Only the right method for right now.
I start from the foundation. Get the basics working. Make sure it's stable, secure, and deployable. Then improve from there.
Not because it's the "right" way, but because in my experience, the things we defer tend to stay deferred. Better to have a simple system that's running than a perfect system that's still in planning.
/ how i work
I ask a lot of questions before I start anything.
What's the actual problem? Why does this need to exist? What's been tried before?
Then I look at the whole picture, not just the piece I've been asked to work on. Because the thing that's broken is usually not the thing that looks broken.
/ what i'm looking for
After 8 years, I'd touched nearly every part of the business.
The breadth of agency work is hard to beat. But I built enough to know exactly where to focus. I know how to build systems end to end, how to make sure data is reliable, and how to keep things running in production. Now I want an environment where I can do that, instead of spreading across everything.
I've worked with fast teams and slow teams, teams with strong opinions and teams that needed help forming them. I'm flexible on most things.
/ what matters to me
- ›Clear scope and room to go deep
- ›People who take ownership of their work
- ›Honest communication