Projects

<h2>The problem</h2>
<p>Alex Phillips had a very successful marketing consultancy, working with big-name clients. His speciality was finding affiliates and partners overlooked by other tools and techniques.</p>
<p>Clients loved the results, but there was one problem: the process of identifying these partners was extremely laborious.</p>
<p>First, Alex's team manually researched thousands of keywords and competitors. Then they entered the data into an enormous spreadsheet, where dozens of formulae tried valiantly to collate and rank the results. Finally, Alex would use his years of experience to intuit the ideal candidates.</p>
<p>It was like watching an episode of House, minus the lupus.</p>
<p>Alex hired me to turn this duct tape masterpiece into a product. Over several months, I helped Alex take his idea from spreadsheet to <a href="https://breezy.io" title="Visit the Breezy marketing site">angel-funded start-up</a>.</p>
<h2>The solution</h2>
<p>I broke the problem down into two parts.</p>
<ol>
<li>Automate the manual processes.</li>
<li>Turn Alex's &quot;intuition&quot; into an algorithm.</li>
</ol>
<p>Given that Breezy was self-funded at the time, there was also a very important third requirement: do everything as quickly as possible before we reach the end of our runway.</p>
<h3>Automate</h3>
<p>There are plenty of existing services that perform research for a given set of keywords or URLs. Unfortunately, none of them did what we wanted.</p>
<p>Rather than reinventing the wheel, I elected to combine the results from multiple third-party APIs, each of which supplies some of the required information. This approach worked well and allowed us to progress quickly, but it brought other challenges.</p>
<p>A typical piece of &quot;partner research&quot; requires around 50,000 requests to external APIs. Each request needs to be queued and processed. Errors need to be handled. Requests need to be throttled. Some requests can run concurrently, others depend on data from previous requests. Some APIs respond in milliseconds, others take 30 seconds or more.</p>
<p>And of course, it all needs to scale.</p>
<h4>The right tool for the job</h4>
<p>Most web apps or APIs take a few milliseconds to process each incoming request. Each request might necessitate a handful of database queries, or kick-off a couple of background processes.</p>
<p>Scaling a typical web application involves figuring out how to handle <a href="/projects/julekalender" title="Such as an API that can handle 11,000 requests per minute">a large number</a> of small requests. This is exactly what most web-centric languages are good at.</p>
<p>Breezy is not a typical web application.</p>
<p>Even with a sizeable customer base, we might only need to handle a few dozen research requests per hour. But each request triggers a huge amount of work.</p>
<p>The solution to this problem is to shove everything onto a queue. The application then works through the queue, processing each job in turn until the queue is empty.</p>
<p>Problem solved, right? Not quite. Pushing a job onto a queue takes time. Pushing 50,000 jobs onto a queue takes a long time. Too long for a language such as PHP, which is <a href="https://software-gunslinger.tumblr.com/post/48215406921/php-is-meant-to-die-continued" title="PHP is meant to die">meant to die</a>.</p>
<p>There are fancy API design patterns to address this problem, but none of them quite solve it. Instead, we need the right tool for the job. In this case, that tool is Node.js.</p>
<p>Node works very differently from PHP. Sure, it might slow down when things get busy, but it won't die. Slow is much easier to cure than dead.</p>
<p>Add in Amazon SQS as a cheap, fast queue, and that's the scaling problem solved.</p>
<h4>Cheap, fast, and good; pick three</h4>
<p>The second automation challenge was monetary. Most APIs charge per request, and 50,000 requests a pop soon adds up. It's no good using third-party services to reduce development costs if they end up costing more than the developer.</p>
<p>Caching to the rescue.</p>
<p>The search engine results for a given term don't change much from day-to-day. The same goes for the number of monthly visitors to a given website or their geographical distribution.</p>
<p>Rather than requesting the same information over and over again, we cache everything for as long as possible. This simple approach reduced API costs by over 80%. It also had the nice side benefit of speeding up results.</p>
<h2>Codify</h2>
<p>With automation done, I moved onto the tricky part: turning Alex's intuition into an algorithm.</p>
<p>The problem with intuition is that it's very difficult to codify. Rather than spending weeks trying to guess the &quot;right&quot; algorithm, I instead decided to iterate my way to accurate.</p>
<p>I started with a ranking algorithm based on 7 criteria. Each criterion is weighted. Adjusting the weightings affects the overall ranking of the results.</p>
<p>With this system in place, Alex was able to rapidly test different weightings, fine-tuning the automated results until they closely matched his intuition.</p>

<p>Working closely with the CEO, I helped transform a bespoke consulting service into an angel-funded startup.</p>


Intuition as a service

<h2>The problem</h2>
<p>In the space of a decade, the home-sharing economy—spearheaded by Airbnb—has grown from nothing to a $50 billion a year industry. Not surprisingly, lawmakers are struggling to figure out how best to regulate this brave new world.</p>
<p>The problems with &quot;vacation&quot; rentals are well documented: fewer available properties for locals, increased rents, and a lack of community. What is less obvious is the benefits of home-sharing, particularly for people who are struggling financially.</p>
<p>With cities around the world passing new legislation targeting the home-sharing economy, Airbnb needed an effective way to tell their side of the story.</p>
<h2>The solution</h2>
<p>Airbnb Action helps people contact their local and national representatives to voice their support for Airbnb.</p>
<p>Given a location, Airbnb Action uses multiple third-party APIs to identify the elected representatives, from the national government down to the local district.</p>
<p>The application then suggests a template email which the user may choose to customise, before sending it to their representatives. The template emails are available in multiple languages and managed via a CMS.</p>
<p>After a successful pilot in New York, Airbnb Action was rolled out across several major international cities, including San Francisco and Barcelona.</p>


<p>Airbnb Action helps people contact their representatives in support of the home-sharing economy.</p>


Home-sharing is caring

<h2>The problem</h2>
<p>There are countless website monitoring services that will ping your endpoints and examine your uptime.</p>
<p>But what about the services that a website depends on? Your registration page may load in a millisecond, but it's not much good if the service you use to send verification emails is down.</p>
<p>Some services have status pages. Others have RSS feeds. Some simply rely on Twitter. Keeping track of everything is tedious and time-consuming.</p>
<p>This is particularly problematic for small web agencies responsible for hosting and monitoring their clients' websites. Each project has its own set of services, and each client needs to be notified when there's a problem.</p>
<h2>The solution</h2>
<p><a href="https://github.com/monooso/happystack-app" title="Visit the Happy Stack GitHub repository">Happy Stack</a> automatically monitors over 250 services, using a combination of first-party APIs, status feeds, and (when all else fails) web scraping.</p>
<p>Each project within Happy Stack defines the list of services to monitor and the agency and client notification settings. The agency can instantly see the status of all of its projects using the live status dashboard.</p>
<p>Sophisticated scheduling rules ensure that clients don't receive notifications in the middle of the night, and never receive more than one per day.</p>
<p>The entire project, from initial idea to launch, took less than 10 weeks. It was built using the TALL stack (Tailwind, Alpine.js, Laravel, Livewire), and the source code is <a href="https://github.com/monooso/happystack-app" title="Visit the Happy Stack GitHub repository">available on GitHub</a>.</p>


<p>Happy Stack monitors the services a website depends on and notifies you when there's an issue.</p>


Service monitoring for web agencies

<p>Each year, Norwegian Air celebrates Christmas with a web-based advent calendar. Instead of chocolates, people are rewarded with prizes and special offers.</p>
<p>Within hours of being launched, the Norwegian Air Julekalender was serving nearly 5,000 requests per minute. By Christmas Eve, that number had peaked at nearly 11,000 requests per minute.</p>
<p>The Norwegian Air Julekalender was built by a three-person development team, distributed across 10 timezones, working to a tight—and immovable—deadline. The entire project was delivered on time, and on budget.</p>
<h2>Technical details</h2>
<ul>
<li>The Julekalender is a single-page application. The React front-end is powered by a Laravel API.</li>
<li>The architecture of the Laravel application adheres closely to the SOLID principles.</li>
<li>The API is fully-documented, using API Blueprint. This enabled parallel development of the Laravel API endpoints, and the React client application.</li>
<li>A comprehensive test suite ensures the API works as advertised.</li>
<li>The site is multilingual. The available contests, partners, prizes, and offers vary across 5 different regions.</li>
<li>Every piece of content is managed by the client using a Laravel-based CMS.</li>
</ul>
<h2>My role</h2>
<p>As the lead back-end developer, my primary responsibilities included:</p>
<ul>
<li>Making key architectural decisions about the Laravel application.</li>
<li>Designing and developing a fully-documented RESTful API, which drives the entire SPA.</li>
<li>Developing a system to pre-generate and intelligently cache API responses—a vital step to handling the extremely high traffic.</li>
</ul>


<p>For the Norwegian Air advent calendar, I helped build a Laravel API capable of serving 11,000 requests per minute.</p>


The API that saved Christmas

<h2>The problem</h2>
<p>Collaborating on 3D content is challenging. The fundamental problem is that most projects involve two disparate groups:</p>
<ul>
<li>3D artists, responsible for creating the models in an application such as Blender or Cinema 4D.</li>
<li>Non-technical users, responsible for reviewing work and providing feedback.</li>
</ul>
<p>This isn't a unique problem, of course; a website has similar stakeholders. The difference is that web designers have tools to bridge this gap. These tools allow non-technical users to comment on an in-progress design without the need to install Photoshop or Figma.</p>
<p>In the world of 3D planning, the solution was rather more rudimentary. Instead of a sophisticated web app, stakeholders typically resorted to emailing screenshots back and forth.</p>
<p>What the industry needed was a tool that made collaborating on a 3D project as easy as collaborating on a new website design.</p>
<h2>The solution</h2>
<p><a href="https://previz.co" title="Visit the Previz website">Previz</a> is a web application that allows every stakeholder to cooperate on a 3D project, regardless of their technical ability.</p>
<p>Users can interact with a full 3D scene directly in their browser without installing any software. They can easily provide feedback on any element, from textures to timelines, enabling more precise feedback and faster approval.</p>
<p>Companies such as the BBC, LinkedIn, and Land Rover have used Previz to plan everything from new car launches to worldwide stadium tours.</p>
<p>Working side-by-side with the CTO, I played a major role in implementing the entire application. My primary responsibilities included advising on key back-end architectural decisions, and developing the API which drives the entire application.</p>
<p>Previz was built by a three-person team, operating across 15 time zones. Fittingly, it was named &quot;Collaborative Environment of the Year&quot; at the prestigious AV Awards.</p>

<p>Previz lets you plan and preview complex 3D content in any modern web browser. No plugins to install, no software to license.</p>


Collaborative environment of the year

<p>Single Story saves you from the never-ending news cycle, by emailing you the most-popular article from your preferred news source, every day (or week, if you prefer).</p>
<p>One article doesn’t sound like much, but because it’s the most-shared article there’s a good chance it’s the thing you most need to know. And then you can get on with your day.</p>
<p>Single Story supports over 30 news sources. You control whether you want to receive an article every day, once a week, or not at all (because we all need a break sometimes).</p>
<p>The entire project is <a href="https://github.com/monooso/news.single-story.app">open source</a>, and free to use.</p>
<h2>Technical details</h2>
<ul>
<li>Single Story is built using Laravel. It uses Blade for templating, and SASS for styling.</li>
<li>News stories are retrieved from <a href="https://newsapi.org/">the News API</a> using a scheduled Laravel job. You can easily swap out news sources, as required.</li>
<li>The code is formatted using PSR-2.</li>
<li>The architecture follows the SOLID principles.</li>
<li>A comprehensive test suite—both unit and integration—ensures everything runs as expected.</li>
<li>You can review the entire codebase <a href="https://github.com/monooso/news.single-story.app">on GitHub</a>.</li>
</ul>
<h2>Key skills</h2>
<ul>
<li>Custom Laravel application development</li>
<li>Integration with third-party APIs</li>
<li>Password-less sign-in, built from scratch</li>
<li>Scheduled generation of user-specific emails</li>
</ul>

<p>Single Story saves you from the never-ending news cycle, by emailing you the most-popular article from your preferred news source, every day (or week, if you prefer).</p>


Don’t read all about it

<h2>The problem</h2>
<p>For most of us, navigating the legal system is impossible without help from a qualified solicitor. This, combined with cuts in legal aid, means more and more people are turning to the <a href="https://www.rcjadvice.org.uk/" title="Visit the RCJ Advice Bureau website">RCJ Advice Bureau</a> for help.</p>
<p>RCJ Advice Bureau has access to a limited number of pro-bono solicitor hours. The complexity of court forms means otherwise straightforward civil cases such as divorce consume much of this time.</p>
<p>RCJ decided to create an online tool to solve this problem, and turned to <a href="https://electricputty.co.uk/" title="Visit the Electric Putty website">Electric Putty</a> for help. Electric Putty in turn hired me.</p>
<h2>The solution</h2>
<p>Working with RCJ Advice Bureau, Electric Putty walked through the entire divorce process. They removed the jargon and compiled a series of simple questions that any layperson can answer.</p>
<p>I then created <a href="https://www.courtnav.org.uk/" title="Visit the CourtNav website">a web application</a> that enables clients to answer these questions. The application supports conditional logic based on previous answers, further reducing the number of questions a client must answer.</p>
<p>At any point in the process, a client can request feedback from a qualified solicitor. Solicitors log in to the application and review feedback requests. If there is a problem, they can attach comments and guidance to the question.</p>
<p>Once everything is approved, we generate the court-ready legal documents as PDFs.</p>


<p>CourtNav simplifies the paperwork for civil cases, empowering individuals and saving pro-bono solicitor hours.</p>


Intuition as a service→

Home-sharing is caring→

Service monitoring for web agencies→

The API that saved Christmas→

Collaborative environment of the year→

Don’t read all about it→

Law without the legalese→