Ben Court

CV

Intro

I have been working professionally as a web developer for twelve years. During that time I have gained experience across the full stack but found that my skills and interests lie in front end with a focus on accessibility, performance and progressive web apps.

I have worked in a range of different environments and team sizes, including sole front end developer, part of an agency team, in-house product team and remote startups.

My interest in computers started at a young age with my first taste of web development coming when I taught myself (D)HTML and CSS to customise my MySpace profile. From then on it became a hobby which I kept up in my spare time whilst studying and pursuing a career in music.

After a short career as a professional musician I decided to turn one of the only other things I was passionate about in to a career and proceeded to spend my evenings and weekends brushing up on my skills until I was able to get a role as a junior developer.

Relevant Skills

My main expertise are HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I have limited experience with other languages.

Throughout my career I have gained experience with many different tools, frameworks and libraries. The main ones I still actively use being:

Relevant Career History

Senior Software Engineer, Utility Warehouse

to

Tech stack: React, GraphQL, TypeScript

Senior Software Engineer, Roku

to

Tech stack: React, SASS, Express

Senior Front End Engineer, Sonovate

to

Tech stack: React, Next.js, Apollo GraphQL, TypeScript, Styled Components, Jest, Playwright

Front End Engineer, Studee

to

An ed-tech startup helping students find and enrol in universities abroad.

Tech stack: HTML, SASS, Web Components, Node.js, Express, Handlebars

Estimating, planning and breaking down requirement documents in to stories and sub-tasks to be worked on in two week sprints. Developing new features for the site as well as maintenance of existing code. Monitoring site performance. Introducing new techniques/methods to improve the accessibility, performance and maintainability of the site. Adding tests to improve code coverage and reduce regressions.

Introduced web components in to the tech stack to easily create reusable components and take advantage of progressive enhancement to ensure the site worked without JavaScript.

Used service workers to take advantage of modern browser features such as progressive web app support and pre-caching UI assets improving the site performance.

Senior Front End Developer, Inspiretec

to

A software company and agency focusing on the travel sector.

Tech stack: React, SASS, Next.js, TypeScript, GraphQL, Umbraco, Sitecore

Working as part of the agency team, my role involves supporting and developing existing and new client websites as well as mentoring junior developers and ensuring that the frontend tech stack stays up to date.

Senior Front End Developer, TrakCel

to

Software company creating cell and gene therapy software.

Tech stack: Angular, Web Components, ExtJS.

My main role is to lead the migration of the web app from a monolith written in ExtJS to separate micro-frontends written in Angular with shared UI components being written as Web Components.

On top of this I help maintain the existing legacy system and up-skill other developers, helping them learn the latest front end frameworks, advancements and best practices.

Web Developer, Pi-top

to

An ed-tech startup that create Raspberry Pi powered hardware and accompanying software for STEM based learning.

Tech stack: React, Apollo, Styled Components, Express, GraphQL, MongoDB, Loopback, Node.

I worked on the web app to complement the new hardware. The app allowed teachers to create briefs/challenges which their students could start projects based on and included features such as drag and drop, uploading of images, videos, audio and code snippets as well as multi-person collaboration and versioning.

Front End Developer, Inspiretec

to

A software company and agency focusing on the travel sector.

Tech stack: React, Vue, Ractive.js, Handlebars, Jade, jQuery

I mainly worked across two of the companies products;
Holistic - A travel CRM platform. I worked on fixing bugs and adding new features/pages which were written in Vue.
Harmony - My mail role on the project was a rewrite of the admin dashboard using React.

Senior UI Developer, Hitched

to

The UK’s largest wedding planning website.

Tech stack: React, TypeScript, Express, React Native, SASS, jQuery

The original code base was over 15 years old, written using ASP web forms and jQuery on the front end for client side features. The performance of the site had become very bad which was affecting their popularity as newer competitors had much faster websites.

We decided that the best way forward was to start breaking the site in to smaller micro services which could then be written from scratch using modern frameworks with performance in mind. I worked on the first micro service which was a supplier search directory written using TypeScript and React. It featured isomorphic rendering using Express and communicated with a restful API.

As well as that I worked on adding new features to the existing site, bug fixing and refactoring the legacy codebase using TypeScript and SASS and improving performance where possible. I also created a POC mobile app using React Native.

Front End Developer, Eteach

to

A recruitment company/job board that specialised in education jobs.

Tech stack: AngularJS, JavaScript, SASS, jQuery

My main project was working on an internal website allowing staff to search through a database of over 1 million candidates to match client requirements, filter results, create short lists and if no suitable candidates were found they could turn the search in to a job advert which was posted to the main job board site.

On top of this I also built a number of static marketing sites for various areas of the business and worked on updating the main job board site to add responsive styling and improve performance.

As the sole front end developer I had to chose the tech stack used for any front end projects. I gained experience with task runners and building/bundling libraries such as Grunt, Gulp and Webpack. The internal search tool was built using Angular (v1) and marketing sites were built using HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Front End Developer, The Strategies Group

to

An agency focussing on job boards and recruitment agency websites.

Tech stack: JavaScript, Ionic, LESS

On top of regular client builds I personally took on two large projects.
I rewrote the front end for the admin system using the latest HTML5 and CSS3 features to be fully responsive. I used the Bootstrap framework for responsive structure and styling and replaced the legacy jQuery code with modern JavaScript to improve performance and make future maintenance easier.

The other project was to build a mobile website which could be sold as an add-on to clients. It was a stripped down version of their main site which pulled in the jobs via an XML feed so candidates could quickly search from their mobiles and either apply for jobs (using their LinkedIn profiles or a saved CV from their account on the main site) or star the jobs to apply from the main website at a later time. It was written using HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. It used Bootstrap for responsive structure and LESS for styling allowing it to be easily re-skinned to match the clients main website.

The separate mobile websites were eventually phased out and all new builds were fully responsive and mobile optimised. The next project I started was to create a hybrid mobile app using Cordova/Phonegap but left before completing this.

Junior Web Designer/Developer, Snailwhale

to

Tech stack: Django, Python, Jinja, jQuery

This was my first professional development job, I worked as a designer/developer. The tech stack used was Django and a custom built Python CMS and front end code was written using the Jinja templating library. It was here I learnt that my skills and interests were more focussed on front end development.