Bangkok City, Thailand
I lead the Frontend & Design teams at ScreenCloud where we look after around 100 different webapps ranging from simple Facebook & Google integrations right up to apps powered off your HR and sales systems. I love all things web-based, and tweet about my favourite new trends and ideas @michael_m117. Previously, I was a Tech Lead at Deloitte Digital and Head of Frontend where I specialised in building up the web team and leading web-based delivery teams at major clients. I'm the founder of a popular WordPress and design blog, Pro Blog Design, where for many years, we offered high quality custom design services, and I wrote articles which were published to over 12,000 subscribed RSS readers, and around 100,000 monthly unique visitors at its peak. I also set up PliablePress.com, a site which sold premium WordPress themes to customers, all of which were built on an easy-to-use framework I developed. I sold this business on in Spring 2012. Specialties: React, JavaScript, TypeScript, Angular, Node, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, WordPress, PHP, HTML5/CSS3, ActionScript.
I lead our Engineering teams, where we work hand in hand with Product and customer-facing groups to design and build the next generation of digital signage. The goal is a seamless, engaging experience to help people inside companies of all shapes and sizes to communicate better with each other.
Belfast's mission is to be the driving force behind ScreenCloud Apps. Apps provide the magic on screen; they enable everything a user can see or do on their displays. To do this, we truly want to make ScreenCloud the best place we can to work. How do we grow teams but stay connected? How do we challenge people so they're always engaged and grow in their own careers? How do we keep the user's viewpoint top of every decision so we ships products you're proud of building? Tech stack normally: React, AWS (big serverless advocate with Lambda/DynamoDB/Kinesis and co! But containers and SQL have their place too 😃 ), JavaScript & TypeScript, React Native for mobile, monorepos with ridiculously helpful CI/CD pipelines etc. The nature of building an app store means we develop a platform of common tools & components to build from, but each project then adds a little something unique of its own. So the list above never stays still for long! Open roles at: https://screen.cloud/careers/belfast - Message me any time if you're interested! Or if you don't see your ideal role right now, message anyway. We're regularly hiring, and you shape the roles to fit great people, not the other way around 😄
One of the two people hired to start the Belfast office. This covered the works; from finding office space, recruiting teams (before we even had somewhere for them to work!), sourcing equipment and onboarding, through to helping our first team members settle in and deal with the unexpected quirks of setting up a new studio for a company. Day to day, I focus on the frontend. At ScreenCloud, we have over 80 apps (so far!) which had been built by a 3rd party. I needed to make it easier for the team to pick these up in a short space of time and support that quantity going forwards. This includes the nuts and bolts for developers, like creating a standard deployment for new webapps (via Troposphere and Cloudformations to AWS), a common build process (App generators, linters, webpack configs etc) and setting up our first end-to-end test tools (With Cypress.io). We're also experimenting with a monorepo vs separated individual repos, one step at a time. And lastly, I do of course code and get stuck in on PRs every single day and hopefully always will 😃 (Mostly React + TypeScript frontends right now, with Express or Lambda backends, all running on AWS)
I lead the technical design and build of modern webapps for clients. I specialise in JavaScript development, with deep experience in React, Angular, ES6, TypeScript, Node.js, Webpack and many more tools from the modern frontend toolkit. Of course, I also work across the stack to deliver apps. With large clients, any product delivery involves working with both business and technical teams across the company to design how it could work, and then working with developers in all of these areas to debug the inevitable issues that come up. Current project: - Lead development of online bank account applications for a large UK bank, using Angular/TypeScript/Karma with SpringMVC APIs.
I lead the design and development of complex webapps with a strong JavaScript focus. - Designed and led the development of the first online account opening application forms for a large bank. This involved leading a team of 12 people, and working closely with a large number of other teams we depended on. We used kanban to manage the work. - Tech lead for the web frontend on several projects, and introduced our company to Facebook's React framework. This included using Flux to manage data flow and Jest for unit testing, as well as helping to guide team members towards React best practices (As it can be very different to what developers are used to doing). - Led the frontend development of a real-time mapping application for a large transport company. We used live data feeds from cameras to calculate traffic flow, and then visualise this in various forms on a map. Performance was a key consideration here, as even the frontend needed to handle huge amounts of data. - Helped deliver a responsive, modern website for a large insurance company using HTML5/CSS3/JS on the front end, Java for the backend, and automated BDD tests across both with Selenium. - Reviewed hundreds of pull requests (And submitted hundreds too). Keen supporter of collaboration and peer feedback for improvement.
Developer on a 5-person team which delivered BT's video-on-demand app for YouView (Set-top box for your TV: http://www.youview.com/). The app was similar to iPlayer, letting users stream content, purchase movies, bookmark their favourites and search. Also helped to deliver BT Sport over multicast on YouView. Designed and led on the development of Ulster Rugby's official iPhone and Android apps.
Pro Blog Design is my design agency. Along with designers I contracted, I provided professional web design services and specialised in WordPress blog design, with one of the top blogs on the internet about the topic. Clients ranged from one-person blogs up to full e-commerce sites and large political organisations. Geographically, I worked with people all over the world, including China, Iran, Brazil, the US and many more. I stopped all of my client work in advance of taking up a full-time role with BT, though I still maintain the sites and blog from time to time.