Analog Republic analogrepublic.com (opens in a new tab)
2015 - 2021 · Remote
Senior Full-Stack Developer
More than five years at Analog Republic, growing from mid-level to senior engineer and modernising the team's tooling, across work for bands, sports teams, research studies and luxury brands.
The start
I joined Analog Republic after a year at Tann Westlake, where I’d been building client websites in WordPress. I arrived as a mid-level engineer with a working knowledge of CSS, JavaScript and PHP.
My first work was on smaller projects: UI changes and simple backend updates.
Remote
From early on I worked remotely across time zones with the US West Coast.
Taking the lead
Over time I moved from picking up tasks to owning projects.
Project leadership
I led projects from planning through development and deployment, and made updates to our internal frameworks and tooling.
Quality
I held a high bar of engineering on our higher-profile client work.
Artists and their fans
Part of my work was building subscription fan clubs for popular music artists, including migrating their existing subscribers across.
Key moment ·Custom Shopify integration
One of country music’s biggest artists needed a membership platform, covering member benefits, early access to tickets, meet-and-greet sign-ups and limited-edition merch runs.
I worked on the custom Shopify integration behind it. Fans got a single sign-on, and the store knew who was a paid member so it could offer them member-only merchandise.
Key moment ·Live music player
DEEP is Pearl Jam’s player for their live shows, with integrations to Apple Music and Spotify.
Fans can search and filter the archive of shows by year, country and city, save shows to their own collection, build playlists, listen to featured playlists and use a setlist generator.
Fans on the terraces
For the New York Red Bulls, the brief was to get supporters making things, not just watching.
Key moment ·Fan design contest
The team wanted fans to design a scarf that would be produced and handed out at the New York Red Bulls Supporters Game.
We built an online scarf designer for desktop and mobile, letting fans choose colour schemes, patterns, logos and text, or upload their own design from Photoshop templates. Every entry went into a fan gallery, and judges picked the winner through a fully moderated admin system. You can see the scarf builder in action.
I also worked on a fan photo competition and designer for the club.
Other worlds
Agency life meant moving between very different industries, each with its own problems to solve.
Key moment ·Luxury yacht web platform
With a main brand website and over 30 dealership sites, Sunseeker needed a clean way to deliver content across multiple domains from one place.
We built a custom CMS that gave the marketing team a single source for every site, letting them manage content centrally, translate it and allocate specific content to specific sites.
University health study
The UCSF PRIDE Study is the first population-level longitudinal study of LGBTQ health, aiming to understand the community’s priority health issues and disparities.
Analog Republic built the study’s free iPhone app on Apple’s ResearchKit, enabling real-time consent, enrolment and participation, and letting participants raise the health concerns that mattered to them.
Residential property
Fairfield needed a site that attracted new residents and also gave investors a clear message about its property portfolios.
We built a custom CMS that merged data from multiple third-party platforms into up-to-the-minute availability and property data, with search by location, region or zip code across the US.
Behind the client list
Alongside client sites, I took on some of the more technically involved work the agency did.
In-house product
An in-house SaaS product, now building-2: a virtual office for remote and hybrid teams that shows who’s around in real time and starts a video call in one click.
It was built on WebRTC and WebSockets, and I developed an Electron app for the desktop client.
Research platform
Test-driven GraphQL APIs and a Next.js front end in TypeScript for a research platform that was due to be open-sourced.
Music industry data
A platform built around a new industry-standard format for storing music project and credit data, with a GraphQL API for web and mobile integrations.
Infrastructure
Deploying and maintaining a service-oriented application running on a Kubernetes cluster.
Open source
One project needed to integrate with the Plaid API and there wasn’t a PHP SDK available, so I wrapped the functionality we needed into a small package.
Raising the bar
By the time I left, I was helping set how the team worked, not just what it built.
Key moment ·Engineering practice
I was a pivotal force in bringing the engineering team up to date with new tooling, frameworks and ways of coding.
I introduced CI/CD and automated testing, Docker, Laravel and React, and worked to level up the team on them, including migrating our work to Laravel, a well-established PHP framework.
People
I mentored and guided newer hires and overseas contractors so that they were proficient with the latest tooling and able to work independently on tasks.
What came next
I finished at Analog Republic in 2021 and moved on to Shopify, where I spent more than five years working on the Shop app, making it one of the world's best shopping and tracking destinations.