When I began developing the booking engine for Holiday Caravans Direct (HCD), I knew it would need to do more than just store bookings....

When people think of building a SaaS product, they often imagine a team of engineers, designers, product owners, and testers working...

When I first inherited the front end at Holiday Caravans Direct (HCD), it was built using a mix of jQuery, Knockout.js, and traditional...

Modernisation projects are often framed in extremes: you either rewrite everything from scratch or do nothing at all. But real-world...

One of the most technically rewarding challenges I faced at JLT Development was architecting support for white-labelling within the...

If there’s one architectural debate that seems to resurface in every project, it’s whether business logic belongs in the application...

One of the most technically demanding features I built at Holiday Caravans Direct (HCD) was the booking calendar. It sounds simple on the...

It didn’t happen in a meeting. It wasn’t announced with a title. There was no handover, no ceremony. But one day at Activus, mid-project,...

In many organisations, Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) and tools like SpecFlow are mentioned with enthusiasm but rarely implemented...

In architectural discussions, diagrams are often treated as a formality—a box-ticking exercise for documentation. But I see them...

Holiday Caravans Direct (HCD) wasn't just a platform rebuild — it was a complete technical evolution. When I stepped into the project, I...

Making the leap into contracting can feel like a major career shift - and it is. Before I took on my first contract at Activus, I’d spent...

Some roles leave a lasting impression not because of what they taught you technically, but because of how they redefined your standards....

When faced with a monolith, many teams reach for microservices as the escape hatch. But a rewrite is rarely the answer. In fact, I’d...

Not every lesson comes from someone you admire. In fact, one of the most influential people in my development journey was someone I...

When I joined Holiday Caravans Direct (HCD), I didn’t expect the experience would shape the core of how I think about software...

Before SPAs became the default approach to front-end development, crafting rich user interfaces meant getting creative with simpler...

When people think about contracting, they often focus on the freedom. Choose your clients. Set your rates. Work when and where you want....

In today’s development landscape, speed often takes centre stage. Teams move fast, iterate quickly, and lean on tools that allow for...

It was a throwaway comment. One of those things said in passing that somehow sticks with you longer than it should. A colleague once...