About me

I'm a down-to-earth engineer who loves the web. I've worked on both sides of it: building sites and tools, and supporting the people who rely on them.

Most recently I was Senior Web Developer at IGrow Group in Cape Town, where I built a viewing-booking tool tied into Zoho CRM and rebuilt the rentals site. You can read about that work in the IGrow case study.

Before that I spent six years at Automattic. First, I was a Senior Technical Support Engineer and Project Lead at WordPress.com, where I was named a "Distinguished HE": one of the top 5 of 300+ Happiness Engineers (Automattic's customer support team) in a quarter. Then I moved into product engineering as a Software Engineer on WooCommerce.com, where I co-led the React rebuild of the WooCommerce.com Marketplace.

Earlier, I was Technical Director of Illustrate Digital, a WordPress development agency in Cardiff, for four years. Before that I was Customer Support Manager at Freestart PLC in Wigan, managing a customer and technical support team.

I founded my own consultancy, devNel, in 2018. That's where projects like the Quiver Café sites come from.

I do my best work in a team, helping everyone else do theirs, and I'd rather build something useful than something generic.