Builder, Founder, Engineer

2025

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

Hypa Shift

Introducing Shift

By this point Hypa had built a broad suite of BigCommerce apps, and the pattern was becoming clearer. Categories, Category Merchandiser, and Metafields Manager were strongest because they filled real platform gaps. Store locators, mega menus, and search apps could find customers, but they were more commoditised or crowded. Import/export felt different: BigCommerce's native tools were weak, spreadsheet formats were difficult to work with, and the existing marketplace options had not fully solved the user experience. Shift was a bigger and less immediately glamorous build, but it aimed at a core merchant need: bulk editing, migrations between stores, scheduled jobs, and eventually support for every important resource in the platform. Alongside Metafields Manager, it became one of the apps that felt most strategically important to Hypa's future.
Close
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

This came from a conversation about young children, phones, and the awkward gap where they want to speak to friends from school but still need something safer than a normal device. We both loved the independence of Yoto cards, so the question became: what if voice calling worked like that? James started exploring the hardware side, and I used it as a chance to build the largest thing I had made on the Cloudflare stack, with a proper real-time backend and a Next.js/Capacitor prototype on top.
Close

2024

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

Hypa

Introducing Hypa
Top 24 Ecommerce Voices 2024

This came from an itch for productisation as much as anything. BigCommerce was growing, the app marketplace already had strong best-of-breed players, and I could see room for platform experts to build a suite of practical apps for store owners and developers who wanted to improve operations or the storefront experience without turning every change into a custom project. The public product, community, and thought-leadership work around this period also fed into being included in Dark Matter Commerce's Top 24 Ecommerce Voices in 2024.
Close

2022

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

Metafields Manager

This one started over a Christmas break. I had been watching the BigCommerce forums and Slack, and people kept talking about metafields being useful but awkward because they were only available through the API. There had been an app, but it had disappeared and no one could get hold of the developer. That felt like latent demand sitting in plain sight. The first version could be very simple: a working UI over the API. Get that out, see whether people actually installed it, then decide how far to take it.
Close
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.

BigCom DevX

BigDesign GitHub
BigCommerce docs GitHub

This was me carrying a bit of the Magento community playbook into the BigCommerce world. I spent time in the forums and official developer Slack, contributed fixes to BigDesign and the API docs when app development exposed gaps, and helped run BigCom DevX as a free online developer event with practical talks on headless builds, Stencil, Handlebars, analytics, Tag Manager, and performance. BigComChat came from noticing that the official Slack was deliberately developer-focused, while the wider ecosystem included ecommerce managers, project managers, business analysts, agencies, app partners, and operators who also needed somewhere to compare notes. It grew to 200+ members and became part of the same rising-tide instinct that has followed me across platforms.
Close

2021

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.

Space Bar podcast

After a short time as Head of Engineering, I realised the fit was not quite right and that I wanted to move closer to product. Innovation Director became the beginning of Space 48 Apps: a product lab where we could take everything we had learned from Magento, combine it with the team's platform experience, and apply it to the BigCommerce marketplace. I led the first stage from internal pitch to working products, building Automated Categories, Category Merchandiser, and the first version of Metafields Manager from scratch as sole developer. The role also kept another thread alive: supporting the engineering team through playbooks, shared knowledge, experiment design, DevX sessions, and the kind of leadership voice that helps teams make sense of where the work is going.
Close

2020

2019

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.

Projects archive

This came from seeing Magecart grow as a real agency-side concern. Ecommerce sites had JavaScript arriving from everywhere: Magento admin, Google Tag Manager, third-party snippets, and all the slightly invisible places where trust can leak. Content Security Policy looked like part of the answer, but it was also deeply technical and hard to manage well. Threat Detect was an attempt to make that more usable: learn what was normal, report when new resources appeared, and eventually build up signatures for known problems across sites. It did not take off, and we sunset it, but I still think the difficulty of the problem says something. The pain was real. The right product shape was just harder than we got to.
Close

2018

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

Bettys

This was one of those projects where the complexity was genuinely fun. Fresh products, batches, expiry dates, ERP data, packaging lead times, delivery dates, bank holidays, and a minimum freshness window all had to collapse down into something simple for the customer: a calendar at checkout. I like that kind of systems problem. If the work is done well, the customer never sees most of it.
Close
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.

Speaker Deck
PWA guide

A lot of my Magento work came from the same instinct. A few of us at Meanbee pooled our certification study notes into MageCert, an open-source Jekyll site for Magento Developer Certification revision. Later, I used talks and guides to translate fast-moving technical shifts into something merchants, agencies, and developers could act on, including Progressive Web Apps at the London Magento Meetup. Even the Magento Connect archive came from that preservation impulse, trying to keep useful Magento 1 extensions accessible as the old marketplace disappeared. Different formats, same pattern: collaborate, understand the technical detail, and make the knowledge public.
Close

2017

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.

Introducing Ecommerce Evangelist Tom Robertshaw

PWA guide
Ecommerce platform guide

This was the role I moved into after the Space 48 acquisition: part internal product/business analysis, part technical strategy, part public education. Inside the agency, I supported discovery workshops, helped teams understand client requirements, and brought a product management lens to ecommerce projects. Externally, I continued the community and thought-leadership work through presentations, webinars, articles, and longer guides. The PWA guide was part of that, but so was broader platform evaluation work: helping people understand not just current platform capabilities, but how to compare trade-offs at a higher level when choosing between ecommerce platforms.
Close
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

GitHub

This was the previous AI moment, when the industry talked about big data, machine learning, conversational commerce, and cognitive services. My interest was mostly in application and education: what could these capabilities actually do for merchants, and how should people think about them without getting lost in the hype? The most concrete project was for a real estate client selling Spanish properties, where I trained Watson Visual Recognition to identify room types and then used the classifications to optimise image ordering, prioritising swimming pool shots and exterior views. Around the same time I experimented with Alexa skills that could answer support questions about product price, availability, or order status, and with Messenger bots and ecommerce personalisation ideas. The edges were rough and the systems could not do much beyond their explicit capabilities, but the shape of the opportunity felt familiar when the LLM wave arrived years later.
Close

2015

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

Projects archive

This started as a "wouldn't it be cool if?" project. I was building an agency on Magento, had experience crawling the web from Netcraft, and wanted to know how many Magento sites were out there. I used the Alexa top million, wrote my own technology signatures, and ran it once out of curiosity. Then the Magento community responded well, so I kept going each month and widened it into a broader view of the ecommerce market.
Close
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

magento-footer-js
GitHub

This was the Magento version of a pattern that kept coming back later. International Address Lookup was my first plugin, taking what we had already done with Postcode Anywhere for the UK market and turning it into something broader for international stores. DIY Mage was more explicitly productised: a paid Magento extension and theme that gave store owners a drag-and-drop way to manage page layouts in a platform where that was notoriously difficult. Alongside those products, we kept releasing practical developer tools because we needed them ourselves or because a hackathon sparked an idea: moving JavaScript to the footer, safer database workflows, cache visibility tools, and Docker/Bamboo infrastructure that could spin up environments for every Git branch. Some were products, some were open source, but they all came from the same place: make Magento less painful and package the learning so others could use it too.
Close

2014

2011

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

Meanbee started through friendship and timing as much as a grand plan. Nick and Andy were first on the scene when Magento launched, and one of the first builds was for a store selling clothes for dogs. During the Netcraft year, Nick and I would use the flexi-hours to start early, finish mid-afternoon, then go home and do another two or three hours of Meanbee in the evening. By the time we rented that office before final year, it felt less like a side project and more like something we wanted to graduate into.
Close

2010

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

Magento Imagine 2013 coverage

This started in my final year of university, when Meanbee was already running on the side and I still had Netcraft in my head. I wanted to know how many of the Alexa top million sites were using Magento, so I wrote a Perl crawler and technology signatures to look for the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript fingerprints platforms left behind. I blogged the first number, people found it interesting, and then the obvious next question was how Magento compared with other platforms. Later I applied the same survey approach to responsive ecommerce, looking at how quickly responsive media queries were being adopted, whether sites were mobile-first or desktop-first, and what that said about the Magento ecosystem's shift toward mobile. It was me scratching my own research itch, but it became useful industry evidence too, including being cited by Magento/eBay at Imagine 2013.
Close

2025

Glass Atlas Leadership Team

Launched Hypa Shift

Holler

2024

Launched Hypa Apps

2022

Metafields Manager

BigCommerce Community Building

2021

Innovation Director

Web Almanac Ecommerce Chapter

2020

Head of Engineering

2019

Threat Detect

2018

Bettys & Taylors Available To Purchase

Magento Community and Education

Recognised as a Magento Master

2017

Ecommerce Evangelist

Space 48 Acquires Meanbee and Hivemind

Applied AI and Cognitive Commerce

Keycash

2015

Launched Hivemind

Fractional CTO for ShopGo

Magento Products and Developer Tooling

2014

Doors of Bath

2011

Founded Meanbee

2010

Ecommerce Survey

2008

Netcraft Internship