What I'm doing now

26 Apr 2024

Work

I'm working full-time for a Manchester based Scale-up called Nivo, the role is great as it's a mix of design and development, and I get to work on a portfolio of products including a React app, React Native app, and marketing sites.

Freelancing

I provide freelance and consulting services to bootstrapped founders, so far this year I've delivered:

  • An MVP for an AI music Supervisor built with Next.js and AWS.
  • A Nuxt/Vue frontend for a content marketing platform which I designed in Figma based on a style guide.
  • A component library built with React, StoryBook, TypeScript, shadcn, & Tailwind.

I work with clients in different timezones. If you have something in mind hit me up.

Products

I created my first digital product last year, launched it via #buildinpublic on Twitter, and made some sales, it's called ZippyStarter. I continue to work on it in my spare time, using it on my own projects to speed up development and then iterate on the product by applying any learnings from my own endeavours.

OG images

I'm obsessed with Open Graph images, so built a website to help debug them, along with other meta data, the site's called ogimage.info, catchy I know.

I also created a Chrome Extension to make the process of debugging open graph images even easier

Family

I'm happily married to YuanYuan and Father to 2 brilliant kids. We live in Cheshire, up North.

Improving this website incrementally

This website started as an M.V.P. during the first Covid lockdown, I continue to work on it, you're looking at the 3rd incarnation.

It started out as a WordPress site back in 2012, then, as times changed I migrated to Next.js with Contentful as the headless CMS.

I've since ditched Contentful in favour of MDX, the authoring experience is way smoother.

Judo

I'm keeping up with Judo, there's nothing like it. I started when I was in my 30's and then paused after I had laser surgery on my eyes, had kids, and got married. I started looking for a club for my kids, found one but the teacher made get back on the mat, I'm glad he did. The only problem is picking up frequent annoying injuries!

Reading

I mainly read crap on Twitter, but when I'm not gawking at funny animals I like to read design manuals, self-help books and guides on marketing.