Work

Working at Glide gave me valuable exposure to much larger systems and applications than most of my previous roles. I had the opportunity to work on the main company website, internal APIs (including Laravel APIs), as well as the company's internal back-office system. This system is a monolithic, Symfony-based PHP application with a mature and extensive code base, providing me with some interesting challenges.

Over the summer of 2022, I led the project to migrate the company's financial system from Microsoft Navision to Sage X3. This involved the development of a PHP application which produced large amounts of financial data, sanitising and chunking that data, before pushing it to Sage X3 via its SOAP API. It also required the handling of data, pulled from Sage X3, into the company database. Despite some technical challenges, in particular those caused by the sheer volume of data being processed, the project was successful.

As a senior engineer, my time at Glide also involved the mentoring of more junior engineers as well as attending (and often representing the development team at) regular management meetings.

Offering discount voucher codes and daily deals, DiscountVouchers.co.uk is a website that started life in 2008 and has grown and evolved ever since. Working there between 2013 and 2022, DiscountVouchers.co.uk represents my longest running role so far.

While working at this company, I built the back-office admin system, the main company REST API and in 2019, I rebuilt the main website into its current form. I was also responsible for the company's Email Service Provider integration, including marketing and transactional email templates, mailing lists and segmentation, as well as creating automation flows as required (for example contact reengagement processes).

In addition to this, I managed most third party services that the company used, including Google Workspace (e.g. provisioning Gmail and Drive storage to staff) Google Analytics and GitHub.

LensFinder.co.uk is a price comparison site I founded and built back in 2007. It compares the prices of several major online contact lens retailers, allowing users to quickly and easily discover the most affordable option for buying their contact lenses. It takes into account delivery costs, variations in price according to unit quantity and, after becoming established and reasonably well known, even exclusive discount codes for some of the retailers.

This was my first foray into founding my own revenue-generating online business and while being not only a successful site, it also gave me a much greater understanding of the non-technical aspects of operating an affiliate marketing based website.

I sold LensFinder.co.uk in 2010 and despite the fact that the site seems to have fallen into disuse, this remains one of the most pivotal moments in my career so far.

During my time at ASAP Ventures (2006 to 2013), I worked mainly on their core price comparison website for car hire, Carrentals.co.uk. I also worked on a number of associated sites (mainly car hire white labels) as well as many of the other sites in the travel and automotive sectors that the company owned.

While Carrentals.co.uk served (at the time) the UK market, I was responsible for building the international version, Comparecarrentals.com. This site was financially successful very quickly and was a personal highlight for me, of my time with the company.

ASAP Ventures has, in the years since I worked for them, sold their car hire websites which, under new ownership have continued to evolve. Both Carrentals.co.uk and Comparecarrentals.com are viewable (if somewhat broken), in their earlier states, via the Internet Archive site here and here

Working at ASAP Ventures gave me an amazing introduction to the world of Ecommerce, Affiliate Marketing and S.E.O and allowed me to meet some fantastic people.