Tom Robertshaw Tom
Builder, Founder, Engineer
I've founded companies, led engineering teams, and shipped products used by thousands. A timeline of technical depth, productisation, commercial judgement, and practical AI exploration.
2025
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CIO · agency group integration
Glass Atlas Leadership Team
Part of the leadership team integrating Space 48, Brave the Skies, Bring Digital, and This is Digital into Glass Atlas. Operated as CIO across the integration: consolidated Google Workspace, GitHub, and 1Password, defined the Data Security Policy, and led the company to Cyber Essentials certification.
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Strategic BigCommerce utility
Launched Hypa Shift
Shipped an all-in-one import/export app for BigCommerce handling bulk data management, migrations, scheduling, and spreadsheet workflows. It grew from Hypa's decision to focus product and engineering effort on deep platform gaps rather than commodity app categories.
- React
- Laravel
- Postgres
- Redis
- Heroku
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AI-assisted product prototype
Holler
Designed and built a voice calling app for kids as a side project, end-to-end. Next.js frontend wrapped with Capacitor for native app distribution, Cloudflare Workers backend with Durable Objects managing call state, WebSockets powering real-time call notifications and session management. Built AI-assisted using Amp Code, using the project as a way to test how modern AI coding tools change the speed and shape of solo product development.
- Next.js
- Capacitor
- Cloudflare Workers
- Durable Objects
- WebRTC
- WebSockets
- TypeScript
2024
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Standalone ecommerce SaaS · 468 customers
Launched Hypa Apps
Spun out the BigCommerce apps work into Hypa, a standalone product identity with a suite of apps serving hundreds of customers. I was sole developer for the first two years, building the React frontends, Laravel backends, Postgres databases, and Heroku infrastructure before moving into product lead and senior engineering responsibilities.
- React
- Laravel
- Postgres
- Redis
- Heroku
- BigCommerce APIs
2022
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BigCommerce app · sole developer
Metafields Manager
Designed and built a BigCommerce app for managing metafields through a UI rather than the API alone. It translated a clear developer and merchant pain point into a focused SaaS product, became foundational to the Hypa portfolio, and retained market position as competition entered.
- React
- Laravel
- Postgres
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Forums, events, open source, and professional Slack
BigCommerce Community Building
Built community momentum around BigCommerce through forum support, official developer Slack participation, open-source documentation and BigDesign fixes, the BigCom DevX online event, and BigComChat, an unofficial professional Slack community that grew to 200+ members.
2021
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Space 48 · Foresight Private Equity partnership
Innovation Director
Moved from Head of Engineering into an innovation role focused on product opportunity, experimentation culture, and engineering leadership. Started Space 48 Apps as a product lab, applying the team's Magento-era learning to the BigCommerce marketplace and building the first products hands-on; this later became Hypa.
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HTTP Archive
Web Almanac Ecommerce Chapter
Authored the 2021 Ecommerce chapter for HTTP Archive's Web Almanac, analysing the state of ecommerce technology across the web using large-scale public data.
2020
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Space 48 · ~50 engineers
Head of Engineering
Led engineering for a team of around 50 developers. Introduced lean delivery principles to reduce time-to-visible-work, using early platform prototypes to make discovery more concrete. Proposed and led the company's first playbook initiative, replacing tribal knowledge with structured documentation, defined processes, and discovery plays for drawing out project requirements, priorities, and risks with clients.
2019
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Website anti-virus for JavaScript skimmers
Threat Detect
Beta launched a website anti-virus tool with Nick Jones to detect Magecart-style JavaScript skimmers on ecommerce sites. Built during the peak of the Magecart era when payment data theft via injected scripts was a major industry concern.
2018
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Inventory and fulfilment service design
Bettys & Taylors Available To Purchase
Led discovery and business analysis for Bettys & Taylors of Harrogate's ecommerce platform. Designed the 'Available To Purchase' service, which turns product batches, expiry dates, stock calculations, shipping methods, and delivery dates into a customer-facing checkout calendar. Produced the requirements and technical specification for the service. It is still in operation 8+ years later, now also powering a corporate gifting application.
- Service design
- Ecommerce operations
- Fulfilment logic
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Knowledge sharing, talks, and public resources
Magento Community and Education
Invested deeply in the Magento community through conference talks, technical blog posts, open-source modules, exam revision resources, platform guidance, and ecosystem preservation work. This included MageCert, the PWA guide, and years of practical knowledge sharing.
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Magento Imagine Conference
Recognised as a Magento Master
Recognised by Magento as a Magento Master at Imagine, the platform's annual conference in Las Vegas. The award celebrated impactful community members after a decade of advocacy, open-source contribution, knowledge sharing, and forum support.
2017
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Space 48
Ecommerce Evangelist
Post-acquisition role bridging product, engineering, client discovery, and public ecommerce strategy. Supported internal teams with discovery workshops, requirements analysis, and technical scoping, while continuing public thought leadership through guides, webinars, conference talks, and platform evaluation work.
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Founder transition into leadership team
Space 48 Acquires Meanbee and Hivemind
Meanbee and Hivemind were acquired by Space 48 after years of building a trusted Magento agency with UK and US clients. The move paired Meanbee's technical depth and community reputation with Space 48's commercial strength, broader agency experience, and shared Magento community values.
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Applied AI before the LLM wave
Applied AI and Cognitive Commerce
Explored the 2017-era AI wave through practical ecommerce experiments, including IBM Watson Visual Recognition for real estate image classification, Alexa customer-service prototypes, Messenger bots, personalisation, recommendations, natural language search, and a Magento Imagine talk on Cognitive Commerce.
- PHP
- IBM Watson
- Machine Learning
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Cash-on-delivery risk mitigation
Keycash
Built a system for mitigating merchant risk with cash-on-delivery payments over 12 months, focused on the MENA market where COD is a dominant ecommerce payment pattern. Worked at the intersection of ecommerce operations, financial risk, and regional market behaviour.
2015
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Internet-scale technology intelligence platform
Launched Hivemind
Built a platform that scanned millions of websites monthly to detect and report on technology adoption. Rebuilt the early Perl scripts into Java scanning infrastructure across AWS, with results stored in Redshift and queried through a Laravel/Postgres frontend. Also shipped an API and Chrome extension for real-time technology detection. Paying customers included Rackspace, Magento, and PayPal.
- Java
- Perl
- AWS
- Redshift
- Laravel
- Postgres
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Jordan ecommerce platform
Fractional CTO for ShopGo
Worked with the ShopGo team in Jordan as fractional CTO, shaping product direction and helping development teams formalise their engineering practices and delivery processes.
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Early productisation and open-source tools
Magento Products and Developer Tooling
Built and launched Magento products and developer tools across address lookup, page layout management, performance, data safety, and development workflows. This included International Address Lookup, DIY Mage, magento-footer-js, magedbm, cache visibility tooling, and Docker-based development and staging infrastructure.
- PHP
- Magento
2014
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Personal art project
Doors of Bath
Created an art project with Shari exploring ornate Bath front doors. Mostly from noticing how much personality they have once you start paying attention.
2011
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Magento agency, co-founded during university
Founded Meanbee
Co-founded Meanbee while studying Computer Science at Bath, after an early Magento build showed there was a real opportunity in ecommerce implementation. Built client sites and extensions around university, placements, and summer breaks, then rented an office before final year to give it a proper go. We went full-time after graduation and grew it into a specialist Magento agency with clients across the UK and US, reaching 15 people at peak.
- PHP
- Magento
- MySQL
2010
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Top million website analysis
Ecommerce Survey
Inspired by my internship at Netcraft, wrote Perl scripts to scan the top one million websites and map ecommerce technology adoption. The research expanded into responsive ecommerce analysis, tracking media query adoption, mobile-first and desktop-first patterns, and how ecommerce sites were adapting to mobile.
- Perl
2008
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Internet survey and security company
Netcraft Internship
Interned at Netcraft, the internet survey and security company. Built a dataset aggregating insights from the Netcraft browser extension's user base. The exposure to large-scale internet data and Unix tooling directly inspired the Ecommerce Survey and later Hivemind.