Gavin Jackson
A Frontend Consultant with over 20 years of professional experience, my consultancy company is called Digital Mojo.based in Bath, UK
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Portfolio Stuff I've done
Technical skills
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Frontend Consultancy What I can do for you
My life story (so far) Career summary
This is from 2012, a very. early Adaptive Portal
Annual highlights
2025
Moved to part-time hours at Dunstan Thomas, giving me more time to focus on my Frontend Consultancy, Digital Mojo (and cycling).
2024
Wrote an automated site map generator tool which takes the screenshots artifacts from my automated testing engine and collates them into an interactive, self updating visual site map, using test suite hierarchy to organise the images.
Go to start (2022) >
2023
Began porting ICX to React replacing Knockout.js as the rendering engine of ICX because React is so well regarded in the JavaScript landscape. This is a multi-year side-project.
2022
Wrote my own compiler to allow screens in ICX to be written in HTML instead of JSON, and tooling to provide intellisense for ICX syntax directly in the code editors. Improving developer experience and reduces the barrier to entry for developers to work on ICX.
2021
I created ICX Lite, a disconnected, cut down version of ICX which allows it to be used in any project and hooked up to any backend, it includes my frontend testing framework built upon Cypress.io that does screenshot comparisons.
2020
Dunstan Thomas was acquired by Curtis Banks, and I sold my shares. I also wrote a testing framework which automatically captures and compares screenshots at different device sizes, performs a11y audits and validates performance.
2019
Was instrumental in winning the CanadaLife project, a multi-million pound project for Dunstan Thomas, I lead the frontend development team, reviewing each frontend Pull Request and supporting any core development needs.
2018
Became Group Head of Frontend Development across the whole Dunstan Thomas group of companies. Continued to lead the frontend of the Aegon project while also building the core frontend team.
2017
Led the frontend development to replace the entire platform for Financial Advisers for one of the UK's largest wealth management companies, Aegon
2016
Was part of a multi-million pound merger, where my stock options were realised, and the primary shareholders were able to execute their exit strategies. This happened when Dunstan Thomas acquired Digital Keystone, meeting our target valuation three years early. The Adaptive Portal also won the UK Platforms Award for best use of Platform Technology for our work with Aegon.
2015
Offered a partnership, and the permanent position of Head of Frontend Development in order to make Digital Keystone a more realistic proposition to sell in alignment with the founder's exit strategy.
2014
Designed and built the frontend of the multi award-winning Adaptive Portal, while working on client projects, primarily in financial services. The Adaptive Portal is a framework for rendering lazy loaded Apps onto a dashboard and for rendering dynamic complex forms, either as single forms or in complex multi screen workflow (which are used quite a bit in finance). Adaptive Portal also won the Platforum 'Best in show' award.
2013
Built the frontend of QuickPark which used an early build of the Adaptive Portal to render an SVG map showing available parking bays around various South African cities, the project was designed to work on tablets and phones.
2012
When Digital Keystone decided to move away from Flash as a technology I chose the frontend tech stack. I began work on the early prototypes of the Adaptive Portal as the company strategy shifted from purely an on-site programming services company to one that builds and ships it own product, configuring that product for clients.
2011
Joined Digital Keystone as a contract Flex Developer to build and maintain wealth management applications for Novia Financial and Aegon.
2010
Worked on the Jo Malone website for Estee Lauder as a Flex developer and did a number of other Flash/Flex contracts for clients ranging from Fisher Price to Drink Aware.
2009
In my role as Technical Lead at Oakwood DC I led up a team of 8 Flash Developers to deliver a £300k project for Radica the electronics division for Mattel US. We delivered the project on time and on budget.
2007 - 2008
As Senior Flash Developer at Oakwood DC, I worked on a number of Flash projects for globally recognised brands such as Barbie, Hotwheels, Disney's Cars, Scrabble and The Simpsons.
2006
Worked in Australia for Publicis Mojo as a Web Developer for clients such as Nike, Hertz, HP and the Victorian Government. A highlight was working on the Nike Football website for World Cup 2006 and promotions for Australia's big game against Brazil where they dared to believe that history would not repeat itself (but, it did!).
2002 - 2005
Graduated top of my class from De Montfort University in Leicester in 2002 with a first class degree with honours in Multimedia Computing and was also awarded the best student prize for finishing top of my class. My first few years out of university I worked as a Web Developer in Reading writing ASP and ASP.NET web and windows applications and services before travelling for 20 months.