About
Over the last 15+ years, I’ve been a founder, product designer and front-end developer, focusing on building delightful and easy to use products. I’ve always been an active participant in the community: I organised over 15 industry-leading conferences, advised and spoken at dozens, pushing for more inclusive communities.
Most recently, I’ve been co-running a self-funded and profitable company, Calibre, where I led design, product and communications. ✨
Projects
For many years, every two weeks, I sent a newsletter with web performance and user experience news, tools, case studies resources.
Over the years, I’ve written numerous updates about product improvements and upcoming releases in Calibre.
Often it’s not easy to find which areas of your sites and applications need page speed improvements. I designed the Pages Leaderboard to make it easy to uncover both fast and poor performing pages.
Because Calibre is a tool for teams and collaboration across the entire organisation is critical for succeeding in improving page speed and UX, we built Teams. With Teams, you can view, share and set up reporting in a way that works best for your company.
Because understanding your speed (and its impact on UX) isn’t easy or accessible, I designed a simple, shareable report so builders and site owners can check if they pass Core Web Vitals page speed benchmarks.
Fluctuation in measurements is inevitable in web performance. I designed Budgets to help set meaningful goals based on recommended thresholds and alerting, so teams can address regressions as they happen and celebrate wins.
Side Projects
I co-curated the JSConf EU programme and advised on inclusion policies for the event.
JSConf and CSSConf Australia were a part of a worldwide event family, hosting thousands of people interested in the web platform, front-end development, design and JavaScript engineering.
As a part of a bigger web development-oriented event, I ran a one-day conference for designers and front-end developers in Oakland, CA.
Work Experience
Calibre is a bootstrapped, profitable software as a service platform for measuring and improving web performance. I joined the company in a part-time capacity in 2017, and became a full-time employee and a co-founder in 2020. I used my hands-on skills and strategic knowledge to co-lead the business with sustainability and thoughtfulness in mind.
As a Principal Designer, I was responsible for design systems, branding, marketing, and product design. I established two design systems with accompanying documentation and usage principles. I designed and managed the end-to-end release process for numerous high-impact features.
Outside of design, I wore several other hats, including managing communication channels, support, product marketing and hiring. Within those areas, I ran newsletters, changelog, as well as marketing content strategy. I created a support framework that resulted in a consistent 97-100% satisfaction rate. I authored a hiring process and framework that received candidate feedback as one of the most considerate they have encountered.
Help Scout is a remote organisation building a robust platform for customer support. As a Front-end Engineer, I was the technical owner of Help Scout’s marketing site and its design system.
I reported to the Head of Design, working closely with the Design and Marketing teams to achieve company goals of effectively presenting Help Scout to the world. The most significant projects I successfully released were a rebranding with accompanying branding guidelines and a new help documentation design. I also managed stakeholders while leading the research on possible paths for migrating to a CMS to make it easy to contribute content. In between bigger initiatives, I significantly improved the performance and accessibility of Help Scout’s marketing, as well as reduced technical debt.
Envato is one of the world’s leading communities for creative assets and tools. I joined the Envato Market team as a front-end developer to rebuild the search and results experience. In that effort, I established a new, modern design system and used it successfully ship a crucial part of Envato’s product.
Additionally, I used my designer expertise to coach designers on preparing effective deliverables for implementation, as well as authored front-end standards for other developers to follow, creating a culture of sharing knowledge and empowerment.
&yet is a creative agency offering design and software development expertise as well as building their own products. Reporting to the CEO, my primary responsibilities were leading the design through mentoring, strategic decision-making and hands-on visual design work. This involved managing the design discovery process, conceptualising (through wireframes and prototypes), visual design execution and, in some cases, front-end implementation.
During my time, I’ve designed fun interfaces for several products, such as Talky↗ (a video chat and screen sharing platform) and And Bang (a pre-Slack team communication tool). I’ve also created a design system and authored the accompanying CSS framework to help the team building maintainable, cohesive products without prior design knowledge. Lastly, I remotely collaborated with other members of the design team, artists, and developers on &yet’s marketing for their consultancy offering and community events, such as Realtime Conference↗ and &yetConf↗.
Nodejitsu (acquired by GoDaddy) was one of the first cloud platforms as a service, providing hosting for Node.js applications. As a Design Lead I reported directly to the CEO and CTO, translating their vision for the product, brand and marketing into reality. I’ve remotely collaborated with engineers to design and implement the front-end of the product dashboard, providing an easy-to-use way to deploy and run Node.js applications. I was also responsible for designing and updating Nodejitsu’s marketing website.
Speaking
Education
Contact
Teams
