My work

Plane Spotter Board answers one question: is anything worth driving to the airport fence for in the next half hour? It lists aircraft on approach to an airport, filterable by airframe — quads, double-deckers, widebodies, freighters — alongside the runway direction in use, the field’s weather and where each flight came from.

The first version had every open browser poll the ADS-B aggregators itself. That does not survive more than a handful of users: the community APIs are rate-limited, and upstream load grew with every tab. Now one server polls each airport every fifteen seconds and fans the result out to every browser over Server-Sent Events. Upstream cost is a function of how many airports are watched, not how many people are watching, and nothing on a request path ever calls upstream.

There is no database, because the data has a useful life of seconds — an aircraft on final is on the ground two minutes later. The server keeps the last good snapshot in memory; when every upstream host fails, it keeps serving that snapshot, marked stale with its age, while it backs off.

The tests run against captured real API responses rather than hand-written mocks. A mock only tests my assumption about a payload; a recording of what the aggregator actually returned over Pearson tests the payload. Looking at real traffic is also how the board learned that a flight number’s stored route is often not the route being flown — so it shows the route as scheduled instead of asserting it.

PanMilli is the shop for my handcrafted hats, crowns and accessories. I designed and built it end to end: the storefront, checkout, order emails and the admin dashboard behind them.

Etsy stays the single source of truth for inventory. Firebase Cloud Functions sync listings — prices, images, variations and personalisation options — through the Etsy Open API, so a product is edited in one place and the storefront never waits on Etsy to render.

Payments go through Stripe’s Payment Element, and an order is only recorded and emailed once Stripe’s webhook confirms the payment. Pages are pre-rendered for search engines, and every pull request runs lint, unit tests and Playwright end-to-end tests before it can merge. I also built the brand’s companion Shopify store.

The website for E’shee Clinical Esthetic, a skincare business. I designed it, built it, and have maintained it ever since — an ongoing engagement rather than a launch-and-leave project.

The live site carries the product catalogue, articles and a glossary, and separate sections for professionals and distributors. It is the other half of client work: keeping a site running and current for years after launch.

Its replacement is in preview: a React rebuild with a cleaner storefront — serums, creams, peels and complete systems — shown above. Checkout and accounts are switched off in the preview until it goes live.