Will Thomson

UX Developer @ Blinkk

Aug 2018–present

Remote (freelance)

Lead Developer @ Potato

Jul 2010–Jul 2018

London

• Joined Potato as the first employee and assisted the founders in building a world class development team, with quality at its core.
  • Grew from 4 to 100+ people (70+ developers)
  • Conducted hundreds of interviews
  • Guided the development team in forming long-lasting, lightweight workflows that deliver consistent high quality
  • Joining a company so early required a large amount of multitasking across disciplines, so got involved in most aspects of agency operations
  • Worked with many clients, including Google, YouTube, Android, Skype, PayPal, SuperAwesome, TT International and Mount Anvil
  • Collaborated with other agencies such as AKQA, HUGE, Mother, Toaster, MullenLowe Profero, BBH, Rehabstudio, 72andSunny, and Upperquad
• Provided technical leadership on dozens of large scale projects, mainly for Google and Android.
  • Full stack technical leadership, on project teams up to 30 people
  • Consulted in design sprints and other rapid prototyping
  • Prepared projects for security and code reviews, carried out by the client's expert teams who check for XSS and other vulnerabilities, documentation quality and code style guide compliance.
  • Managed cloud-hosting of projects, mainly Google App Engine and the rest of Google Cloud. Also experienced with AWS, Heroku and Microsoft Azure
  • Conducted load testing and oversaw launches that reached 7,000+ QPS
  • Learned our clients’ internal processes and platforms, then trained and supported the development team at Potato to align with those standards
  • Provided mentoring and regular feedback sessions for developers and senior developers
  • Oversaw the delivery of our client's projects, carried out by other agencies. Checking for code and documentation quality, app resilience and carrying out the launch
  • Worked directly with a client's infrastructure teams to coordinate launches on their platforms
• Frontend development, using modern standards and trends (see Skills).
  • Localisation/internationalisation to 40+ locales including right-to-left languages
  • Worked with static site generators, Django web apps and API backends
  • Worked with many Google APIs including Maps, Calendar, Docs and Moderator
  • Given unprecedented levels of access to a client's internal systems
  • Worked on-site in California and New York on multiple occasions
• Assisted the new business team, including bringing in my own leads, providing feasibility consultation and writing pitches.
  • Initial meetings, giving in-depth introduction to Potato and its values
  • Worked directly with clients, from initial introduction through scoping, estimating, build, delivery and maintenance
  • Created technical estimates and won pitches for projects up to 7 figures
• Other achievements:
  • Single-handedly built an app that reached the top 10 most visited websites in the world on its launch day
  • Launched the first ever website on the .soy TLD
  • Tech led projects that took the top spot on Hacker News
  • Worked from Google offices in 7 cities
  • Provided emergency assistance for our client on projects that weren’t built by Potato
  • Launched/updated multiple websites in real-time during a keynote speech that was being watched by millions of people, making the new content available as the speaker announced it
  • Updated hundreds of thousands of high-traffic web pages in a single day

Lead Web Developer @ Yahoo!

Aug 2008–Jul 2010

London

• Worked in the Custom Brand Experience team producing interesting and engaging experiences for Yahoo!’s highest value advertising customers, including Warner Bros. Pictures, Nissan, Volvo, Diageo, Nivea and Nikon.
  • Hired as Flash Developer from skills learned at the BBC. Switched to Web Developer and then promoted to Lead Web Developer.
  • Took the team from being relatively unknown and detached within the business, to a position which aligned with Yahoo!’s global engineering standards. Trained the team on the wider company’s processes and ethos. This enabled our team to collaborate more, use its pre-existing platforms, and produce more robust solutions.
  • Travelled to Bangalore to be trained on Yahoo!’s new site building platform. Returned to the UK and trained the rest of my team.
  • Led a team of four developers to produce the Yahoo! News UK election website for the 2010 elections. This was built on the aforementioned platform and was the most complex app built on it to date.
  • Acted as technical liaison for agencies producing work for our team.
  • Responsible for requesting new hardware for new projects, based on traffic projections, and for liaising with Tech Ops over releases.
  • Member of the YDN working group, helping to organise Yahoo!’s presence at events.

Client Side Developer @ BBC

Jun 2006–Aug 2008

London

• Worked at Television Centre with editorial teams and designers to produce and maintain websites for the BBC’s higher-profile CBeebies and CBBC brands.
  • Used web standards for optimised accessibility and standards compliance
  • Built Flash games and applications, using XML data input to allow for easy editorial updates
  • Acted as technical liaison for externally commissioned projects
  • Worked to television transmission critical deadlines
  • Represented the Children’s department in board meetings regarding the development of iPlayer
  • Member of the CBeebies Accessibility working group
  • Contributed to commissioning for new and innovative interactive content for children.