Experience

Twelve years writing the code, then the jobs that needed somebody who had.

This process worked because one person remembered everything. That’s not a compliment.

  1. March 2025 – present · Sheffield, remote

    Head of IT

    Pure Unity Health Group

    I own IT strategy, service delivery and IT compliance across the group, supporting more than seventy clinics and staff in Primary Care and NHS-affiliated services. I also support the Medical Legal and Rehab Direct teams working securely with insurers, instructing parties and expert witnesses. Infrastructure, cyber security, applications, data and support — alongside HR, Governance, Finance and Operations.

    • Compliance — NHS Data Security and Protection Toolkit, and PCI DSS.
    • Acquisitions — due diligence, onboarding, and the unglamorous business of merging another organisation’s people, data and systems into yours.
    • Platform, budget and vendor management across the group.
    • Data governance and cyber security, plus the process work that gets IT embedded in how teams actually operate rather than bolted to the side.
    What I learned here
    Key lesson
    Strategy without a working knowledge of the systems underneath it is just a slide deck.
    Skill gained
    Reading a compliance framework as a design constraint, not paperwork.
    Mistake corrected
    Assuming a group of seventy-plus clinics shares one workflow. It doesn’t, and shouldn’t.
    Insight carried forward
    Acquisitions are a systems problem before they’re a legal one.
  2. December 2020 – March 2025

    Co-founder & Chief Technology Officer

    SEEDL Learning

    Co-founded the company and owned the learning platform and the IT infrastructure. Took a concept to a live product: live session booking, on-demand video, learning records, certificates and quizzes, with customers managing their own users, mandating courses and branding their own instance.

    • Achieved Cyber Essentials certification — start to finish, not delegated.
    • Built the IT infrastructure from scratch on Microsoft 365, for a fraction of what the alternative would have cost.
    • Scoped and delivered the platform, and hired the team that shipped it.
    • Automated our own admin — scheduling, reporting and client onboarding tools, because it seemed rude to sell efficiency and then do everything by hand.
    • Held the platform to AA accessibility throughout.
    What I learned here
    Key lesson
    Co-founding teaches you the technical decision and the business decision are usually the same decision wearing different clothes.
    Skill gained
    Building the product and the company around it at the same time, without either one waiting for the other.
    Mistake corrected
    Under-pricing early because charging felt rude for something that used to be free. Cost isn’t the enemy — bad value is.
    Insight carried forward
    Accessibility done from day one is cheaper than accessibility done as a retrofit, always.
  3. March 2018 – November 2020 · Bedford

    Senior Developer

    Phew

    Led projects from first conversation to delivery, working directly with clients to work out what they actually needed as opposed to what they first asked for.

    • Scoped and built an NHS patient discharge system.
    • Wrote the accessibility guidelines the team worked to, and held software to AA.
    • Built a statistics dashboard pulling from several systems that had never been introduced to each other, plus an internal project-tracking and timekeeping tool.
    What I learned here
    Key lesson
    The client rarely asks for what they need first. You get there with better questions, not faster builds.
    Skill gained
    Writing accessibility guidelines a whole team could actually follow, not just quote.
    Mistake corrected
    Treating “the client asked for X” as the end of the conversation instead of the start of it.
    Insight carried forward
    An NHS discharge system taught me the software is the easy 80%. The 20% is understanding exactly what happens when it’s wrong.
  4. September 2016 – March 2018 · Bedford

    Team Lead, Front End

    Xigen

    Supported the team’s work and their growth, ran planning and estimation, and saw projects out to a standard worth putting a name to. Built a timesheet tool to organise and schedule the team’s work — the first of many times the answer turned out to be “write the tool”.

    What I learned here
    Key lesson
    Leading a team is mostly clearing obstacles nobody thanks you for clearing.
    Skill gained
    Estimation that survives contact with reality, more or less.
    Mistake corrected
    Assuming everyone on the team wants to be led the same way.
    Insight carried forward
    The first time “just write the tool” solved a scheduling headache, it became the answer to everything after.
  5. December 2015 – September 2016 · Milton Keynes

    Senior Front End Developer

    Ledger Bennett

    Websites, landing pages and email templates, implemented into WordPress, Umbraco, Eloqua and Marketo, with the gated forms and marketing automation behind them. Making an email look right in the mail client that mangles everything is a skill I have never once stopped needing.

    What I learned here
    Key lesson
    An email that looks perfect in your inbox is a coin flip everywhere else.
    Skill gained
    Marketing automation isn’t marketing. It’s data plumbing with a deadline.
    Mistake corrected
    Trusting a design file over an actual test send.
    Insight carried forward
    If it has to survive the mail client that mangles everything, test it in the mail client that mangles everything. Every time. No exceptions.
  6. August 2013 – December 2015 · Luton

    CTS Front Office Developer

    Lumesse

    Built customised career and recruitment platforms for clients on a SaaS product: a flexible HTML and CSS3 template system, four standard templates, a responsive rebuild that held together at every size, and a refresh of Easycruit’s internal system. Also the first place I worked on the product itself rather than only on what sat on top of it.

    What I learned here
    Key lesson
    Building the product itself, not just what sits on top of it, changes how you think about every project after.
    Skill gained
    Designing a template system flexible enough for several very different clients without becoming several different codebases.
    Mistake corrected
    Under-estimating how much a “small” responsive fix touches when the layout was never built for it.
    Insight carried forward
    Build for the client you don’t have yet, not just the one in front of you.
  7. April 2011 – August 2013 · Milton Keynes

    Web Marketing & Web Developer

    Freestone Creative

    Bespoke websites, search visibility and email marketing campaigns, with the client communication and reporting attached. The job where I learned to explain a technical decision to somebody who did not want a technical answer — useful ever since.

    What I learned here
    Key lesson
    A technically correct answer that loses the room helped nobody.
    Skill gained
    Explaining a technical trade-off to somebody who explicitly doesn’t want a technical answer.
    Mistake corrected
    Leading with how, not why.
    Insight carried forward
    Still the most-used skill in every leadership conversation since.
  8. November 2010 – March 2011 · Milton Keynes · Contract

    SEO & Web Developer

    Burton & Sons Trading

    Five months, one objective: get the key products onto page one. They got there, and the traffic and sales followed them up.

    What I learned here
    Key lesson
    A contract with one clear objective is a masterclass in not scope-creeping yourself.
    Skill gained
    Proving the work with the metric that actually mattered — page one, then sales — not a vanity one.
    Insight carried forward
    Pick the one number that proves it worked, before you start.
  9. February 2010 – October 2010 · Wellingborough

    Website Marketing, Development & First-line IT

    i-Smart Consumer Services

    Improving the company website’s visibility and pitching in on new projects, while helping the IT team keep the servers and machines upright. The start of doing both halves of the job at once, which never really stopped.

    What I learned here
    Key lesson
    Doing both halves of the job — the build and the keep-it-running — teaches you things a pure development role never will.
    Skill gained
    First real infrastructure exposure, alongside the development work.
    Insight carried forward
    The people who only ever build never learn what happens after; the people who only ever run never learn why it was built that way. Do both for a while if you can.
  10. January 2008 – January 2010

    Website Developer, SEO, Email Marketing & IT Support

    THUK Media

    Where it started. Development, SEO, email marketing, client training and IT support — and inside two years, leading a small team. Nobody plans a career that opens with “you do all of it”, but it is a hard grounding to beat.

    What I learned here
    Key lesson
    Nobody plans a career that opens with “you do all of it”, but it is a hard grounding to beat.
    Skill gained
    Being handed a little of everything at twenty and having to get competent, fast.
    Mistake corrected
    Assuming specialism has to come before breadth. For me it was the other way round.
    Insight carried forward
    Everything since has been variations on “a bit of everything”, on purpose.
  11. 2006 – 2008 · Bedford College

    BTEC First Diploma, Information Technology

    Overall grade: Distinction

    Distinctions in website development, networking essentials, and software design and development, plus an Outstanding Achievement award. The networking one has been quietly useful ever since.

    What I learned here
    Key lesson
    A distinction in networking essentials mattered more, later, than it felt like it should at the time.
    Skill gained
    The foundation that “IT” was never going to be one narrow lane.
    Insight carried forward
    Still the reason infrastructure and networking stayed part of the job description, years on.

Read on for the skill list, more on who I am or the problems I enjoy solving, or back to the short version and what I build.