My work

Ready First (R1)

A readiness app for youth athletes aged 6 to 17, used by families and coaches. Parents do simple daily check-ins, and R1 turns them into a daily readiness signal (Rebuilding, Rising or Ready) across Mind, Body and Energy, with guidance on movement, confidence and recovery.

I joined the live app in May 2026 and work across the React Native app and the Node.js backend.

• Built food logging for young athletes. It rates food in simple, child-appropriate terms instead of counting calories, and uses an LLM with its running cost kept under control.
• Designed how the team ships risky changes: each one goes out switched off and is turned on through code review, so releases stay small and easy to undo.
• Built the progress logic for Mind and Energy, which responds to what athletes actually do. Much of the work was turning product and specialist decisions into rules the code follows.
• Co-built a web version of the app used for demos, so it can be shown without a phone.
• Built family sharing, so a child can be shared with a second parent and a coach. It was rolled out in stages because it changes who can see a child's data.
• Built daily check-in reminders and a welcome-back flow for athletes returning after a break, with children's privacy built in.
• Wrote the release smoke-test protocol the team runs before every release.

Collection re-architecture

• Volunteers pick up surplus food from stores in timeslots set by each business. The scheduling system behind this was 10 years old, and small changes kept breaking things.
• With the backend tech lead, I documented how it actually behaved before changing it, then migrated it in production in small steps, behind feature flags with one-click rollback.
• Rolled out over about two weeks with no disruption to volunteers. Two long-standing bugs that caused support tickets every week are gone.
• Added E2E tests for core flows that had none. The charity work that followed became a small change instead of a rewrite.

Olio React Native consumer app

• One of the first front-end engineers on the React Native app. We shipped the MVP in 3 months with a small team.
• Ran the App Store and Google Play releases from 2021 to 2025, coordinating with product, QA and backend.
• Led on app performance, spotting problems early and fixing them as they came up, for example on the item list and map views.

Volunteer platform

• Moved the platform from Rails views to a React SPA, setting up routing, navigation, configuration and linting from scratch. Thousands of volunteers moved over without major issues.
• Extended it from Olio volunteers to charity volunteers, with their own collection flows.

Partner tools

• Built Tomorrow's Collections, which shows partners their next-day pickups. I kept its rules explicit instead of hardcoding them, so later changes stayed small.
• Redesigned the store confirmation flow on my own, mostly in the partner tools and partly across the other platforms. Issue reports dropped by about 90%.
• Led internationalisation: moved date and time handling to Luxon, added Chinese, and set up translation syncing with Loco.
• Mentored mid-level engineers through pairing and code review.

Prototypes

• An early partner platform concept that fed into the Sainsbury's trial, and an AI-assisted appointment planner.