Twenty-eight engagements. One standard.

Hexcel is a global leader in advanced composites technology. We were brought in to work on their internal systems, including a new Azure-hosted application for managing the manufacturing process of composite materials.

The role was to take the project over from a previous contractor and bring it up to production quality — including implementing an Azure DevOps pipeline and a thorough unit-testing suite.

We were invited to join Asda having worked with several of the team previously at Credit Karma. The project was to replace the existing Walmart Scan & Go software with a new Asda version.

This was a multi-faceted project involving React Native development for mobile phones and in-store handsets, as well as ownership of the backend basket-handling service running on Azure Functions and a Cosmos DB, in conjunction with an external retail service provider (NCR).

Our extensive .NET experience also helped solve a critical issue for the team.

A start-up developing an innovative augmented-reality application for measuring room spaces, with AI functionality for identifying mould-related damage for the insurance industry.

We were responsible for taking a former Laravel PHP solution onto an Azure platform, developing .NET additions and working on a React Native client.

Halfway through the year the CTO resigned, and we stepped in to perform that duty and manage the team of developers.

The client wanted an existing HTML site rewritten in React with an Azure backend for serving project content — site images, documents and recommendations — in order to facilitate easy updating.

The site includes an administrative area for managing and uploading new content with the minimum of training required.

An unusual contract: we were hired solely for strong web front-end skills, while the API was Java-based. We took the lead front-end developer role on three key projects for Iliad, whose business is data transaction verification software for the financial industries.

The projects were complex, customer-facing and multi-lingual, supporting multiple branding and an intuitive design.

The role proved essential — lending experience of architecture, project management and Agile practices, and mentoring several of their junior developers, even when Covid meant the last two years were operated entirely remotely.

We moved with the Noddle team to Credit Karma when it was bought out from TransUnion.

Our responsibility was writing a bureau integration layer in Scala to enable the existing Credit Karma infrastructure to interact with the TransUnion UK services.

CallCredit hired us to lead a new development strategy using Angular to help modularise an existing 'monolithic' ASP.NET MVC application — their public-facing Noddle product (noddle.co.uk). We created an Angular subsite and an ASP.NET Web API for handling loan and credit-card searches, with an emphasis on automated UX testing and feedback across multiple devices and platforms.

CallCredit was bought by TransUnion mid-way through the contract, and the Noddle product was divested to Credit Karma. We switched to React to rebrand the existing application using Credit Karma's preferred web platform.

We were approached to set up a greenfield project to develop a healthcare management system, with total control over the architecture, technologies and methodologies — the only requirement being that it should be Azure-hosted.

As an experienced full-stack developer, we built the system and grew a distributed development team over the course of 20 months.

By the end of the project the system used a wide range of Azure services (including Azure Active Directory and integration to Office 365 and SharePoint) and was being used by private and government agencies with over 12,000 users, netting more than £12m in revenue per year.

Worked with the development team on a rewrite of their share-dealing product, using NodeJS to deliver an AngularJS-based user interface with an ASP.NET Web API backend.

We joined towards the end of their first phase of development, during an intensive period of defect fixing and curing technical debt.

Mission Without Borders approached us to produce a financial application to upload and process bank-transaction information, matching it against their existing database of donors and campaigns. This was an HTML/JavaScript/AngularJS front end with an ASP.NET Web API backend.

We were approached by their IT director — a former colleague — to produce a solution very quickly. The project was handled using a Scrum process on Visual Studio Online.

We were hired to work with their client, Channel 4, to rebrand their 4OD on-demand Windows Phone and Windows 8 applications to the new All4 brand.

When this was completed, they extended the contract for another six months to work on a Windows 8 application for AT&T — comprising video on demand, live streaming and DVR — where we brought many years of experience to the project.

Worked on the CapitaSync project — software designed for a call-centre environment for their customers O2 and Carphone Warehouse.

We were lead developer for a team of five and implemented a Scrum process for the whole team, from analysts to testers, to run the O2 and Carphone Warehouse projects.

Worked closely with the Formula One racing team on developing their in-house software, MIDAS, responsible for processing and displaying complex data including race telemetry, Computational Fluid Dynamics simulations and car-configuration data.

This was a hugely complex system, in its ninth iteration, and involved taking a lot of new information onboard while working with a team of outstanding developers.

Our main focus was overhauling the MIDAS user interface to produce a look and feel similar to the Windows RT style of Office 2013. We worked partially on site in Woking and partially remotely.

Worked on a pilot project for a customer-driven printing application used by major banks and service companies to streamline outsourced printing and multi-channel communication. We did extensive UI work as well as RESTful back-end services for sending emails and SMS messages.

After the pilot we were rehired through phases 1 and 2, moving the Ext.JS prototype to Knockout, Sammy and eventually Angular.js, driving a Scrum process around TFS 2012.

Developed a completely bespoke business-intelligence dashboard in Silverlight, working in conjunction with existing database analysis systems and other data sources.

Worked with a team of developers to build a studio resource and project-management system, in the role of lead developer.

Hired as part of a developer team on Tunstall's replacement for their existing telephony call-centre software — a WPF front-end with IVR systems and telephony integration.

Ioko rehired us to work on LoveFilm's new web movie player, implemented in Silverlight 4. We were the lead developer on this project, working closely with Ioko's VP of architecture in London and solely responsible for implementing the Silverlight user interface.

Worked with a team creating a new language-translation management system — a web application with a managed-workflow backend.

Responsibilities included UI development in ASP.NET MVC2 and jQuery, a whole new backend for managing Translation Memory that fuzzy-matched to previous translations, and advancing the team's work in WPF and Silverlight, alongside contract and permanent developers and senior project management.

Worked on the main download client for Sky Player Desktop (Sky's product for viewing content on and offline), in a team of three. Our main responsibility was the Silverlight front-end user interface.

This involved cutting-edge development with the platform, working with the Microsoft Silverlight team to iron out issues we discovered. Ioko employs some of the most skilled and creative developers, and it was a fantastic experience.

A short-term contract working on their accounts portal — a customer-facing site for domestic and business customers. Our main responsibility was implementing a logging and diagnostic system to record website activity, alongside some user-interface work.

Documetric were replacing a 20-year-old Unix system with a new system written in .NET on a SQL Server 2005 backend. We were hired to add our knowledge and experience of web applications to their development team.

Our largest contribution was a Help Desk application written in Silverlight using MVVM, communicating to a back-end web service via WCF. It deployed via their intranet with a desktop-like UI and the option of running outside the browser, and the MVVM design enabled extensive unit testing with NUnit and MOQ.

GDF had an ASP.NET web application, developed by an external team, that was running over schedule. We were hired to assist and immediately spotted issues with the quality and performance of the code.

Our experience of good architectural design, ASP.NET 3.5, AJAX and LINQ was instrumental in bringing the project from potential cancellation to a level that was highly optimised and easy to maintain. We also created a Silverlight version with a WCF service layer, and mentored several junior staff with in-house training sessions.

Pollards hired us to produce an application that would integrate with their existing VOIP telephony system. The user interface had to be visually slick and impactful, and was created using WPF.

Hired on a personal recommendation to help bring a prototype product back on track and business-focused — a WPF desktop client with a WCF-hosted backend.

We introduced design patterns to the project, most significantly Model-View-ViewModel for the WPF UI, and developed a number of modules. With their lead developer we optimised the database and restructured the application to an n-tier design.

A project to add extra functionality to an existing data-visualisation system that we had originally been lead developer on in 2004 — a web/desktop application mainly used by Sheffield Council.

Our role was to guide Manheim in all aspects of a new pan-European .NET project. They had been a Progress development house for over 20 years, so .NET was relatively new to them. We headed up the development team and acted as a technology consultant on modern project management.

Responsibilities spanned solution architecture, database design (normalising and refactoring a legacy Progress design onto SQL Server 2005 with replication), introducing Visual Studio Team Foundation Server across the department, and assessing developers for recruitment.

The project deployed successfully across Portugal, Germany and Spain, and their .NET development grew from 0 to 20 developers. We also used the new Silverlight 2.0 platform to bring desktop screens and a translations database front-end to the web, connecting to a WCF data service with MVVM.

A project to develop an innovative web application supporting their parts-warranty system for clients. The system let clients tailor the application's business processes using Windows Workflow, and integrated with their existing electronic catalogue system.