Projects

Next.js and Vercel, across every brand

Led the migration of all customer-facing sites to Next.js on Vercel, backed by the design-token system and a shared Storybook. Now bringing Vercel costs down with on-demand ISR, time-based revalidation and faster merge-request previews that stay inside Contentful's API limits. CDN and pipeline caching have cut AWS costs by 40%. The sites serve over two million customers.

• Before the move, the Next.js app was statically exported to S3: every content change meant a rebuild and a redeploy, simple third-party data needed its own proxy API, and preview builds hammered the CMS.
• Evaluated Vercel, Amplify and SST (OpenNext) against SLA, on-demand ISR and streaming, and presented the findings to leadership.
• The migration plan put the S3 app and Vercel behind one CloudFront distribution, so the move happened with no downtime and a backwards-compatible trial phase that confirmed the cost estimate.
• The deployment process runs on merge-request previews, with a protection bypass for internal reviewers without Vercel seats and build and deploy logs visible from GitLab.
• Content updates now go live with no wait, previews no longer hit the CMS until a page is opened, and the operational cost matched AWS.

Auth0, company-wide

The group signed with Auth0 for every European business, and I was put in charge of planning the move of the UK customer base, around two million customers, from the customer platform's own login to Auth0, with account data staying where it was. Drove the rollout with another staff engineer: designed the process, got the teams ready for it, branded the login screens for each brand, and added observability across the first projects to adopt it.

• A proxy migration rather than a one-off import of the credentials database: customers trickle into Auth0 as they log in or reset a password, each app moves at its own pace, and the legacy login is switched off last.
• Three phases: proxy, then trickle, then decommission. Customers are moving over without interruption or downtime.
• Authentication is fully observable on New Relic dashboards that combine our own events with the events Auth0 streams.
• Every project was prepared for the switch, including those on different Auth0 SDKs, and stakeholders across teams were kept aligned along the way. The result is one security standard for all applications.

Design-token system

Started as a proof of concept I led as a senior engineer, now in use across high-traffic pages and behind every customer-facing site. Tokens are managed in Tokens Studio, built with Style Dictionary, and ship with a Storybook maintained for designers and developers together.

Delivery pipeline: an hour to minutes

Rebuilt the deployment and feature pipelines, cutting runtime from around an hour to 12 minutes, and to 7 in some repositories. Added a rollback mechanism that reverts or freezes deployments within minutes when observability alerts fire. Then removed the release ceremony altogether: e2e-tested features merge straight to main behind feature flags, taking time to delivery from days to hours, with tooling that helps the QA team write and prove test cases faster.

• The starting point was an hour-long pipeline and a two-hour path to production, with third-party dependencies that could fail the whole run and block even emergency fixes.
• The trade-off was deliberate. A release ceremony and a develop branch were safe but slow, so both went, replaced by merge-request pipelines that fail fast: smoke and critical-path end-to-end tests on every merge request, a scheduled full end-to-end run against production, and a one-step rollback and deployment freeze.
• Runtime came down through unit-test sharding, right-sized runners, caching for builds, the UI library, dependencies and GraphQL introspection, and job dependencies rearranged so later stages start early.
• Third-party outages no longer block a deploy, and the QA team trusts releases more because the end-to-end tests catch problems first.

Accessible navigation on Contentful

Rebuilt the navigation system on Contentful and made it fully accessible, with the standard enforced through ESLint and Axe. Led a major dashboard rewrite in the same period.

Digital asset management platform

A digital asset management platform that brands such as Universal, Morrisons and Heinz used to manage their brand assets. My main project was the upload tool. Alongside it, developed the approval and comment workflow, refactored the legacy codebase to improve performance and fix bugs, then rebuilt the front end from scratch for the product release.

• Uploads are multipart and recover from a failed transfer rather than starting again.
• Many files can be uploaded and assigned to one project in a single go.
• Media assets up to 20 GB are handled.

Client tags: tree shaking and bundle splitting

Developed client triggers and proofs of concept, and introduced Webpack tree shaking and bundle splitting for the client tags. Refactored backend PHP and built widgets for the internal analytics dashboard.