A senior front-end software engineer in London
July 2025
I wanted to try building my own API, so why not one about pubs - as there doesn't seem to be a good open API for that already.
A lot! This was my first time building an API from scratch, so I learnt about Express routing, middleware, authentication with JWTs, database modelling with Prisma and PostgreSQL, data validation with Zod, payment processing with Stripe, email sending with Resend, and more.
Well some of this was a little too reliant on Co-Pilot, as I've never written an API and sometimes I was too focused on getting something to work, rather than understanding the code. Also I really need to write tests. But this is unfinished and unreleased anyway. It works!
February 2025
When I was growing up, I wanted to become a meteorologist. I was never quite good enough at physics (my maths was good enough) so it never came about. But then when I started playing around with blogs, circa 2010, I made a weather forecasting one for the Reading area, where I lived at the time, which is mostly on Facebook and has 15,000 followers somehow. This is kind of a Facebook escape really.
I wanted to try Svelte, and this project taught me how to stitch SvelteKit into a WordPress/GraphQL back end. I didn't enjoy Svelte as much as I do Astro.
I probably wouldn't use Svelte again, some things like comment recursion were a pain. Also would like to develop more features for it.
May 2024
This was me finding a project to try out Astro, having heard good things about its performance and flexibility.
This was my first time wiring an Astro front end to my hosted GraphQL API.
Nothing really...though I'm sure I'll discover something in the future.
May 2023
I wanted to redesign my personal blog, as it was pretty dull-looking and I'm quite colourful in real life.
This was the project where I started using Github Actions for my pipeline checks, and also using Husky for pre-commit checks.
Not sure I would do anything differently, though I think I did rush to try to complete it...I do need to do a little cleaning up. Or maybe Co-Pilot needs to!
June 2022
I got a bit annoyed at M&S for some reason I forget now, but realised that my portfolio was the same one as before I was ever an engineer
I didn't do anything crazy for this, I just took a NextJS template and redesigned it a bit. It was my second NextJS project, the other being a work project that was already set up, so I learnt a bit about how to set up a NextJS project from scratch.
Not sure I would have done much differently. It was really good practice for the technologies we were moving to at M&S. I realised that I wasn't a Tailwind convert as I was forever having to look up classnames which slowed me down.