Gavin Jackson
Hi, I'm
Frontend Developer

Gavin Jackson

I'm an extremely focused and productive, hands on Head of Frontend Development with over 20 years of professional experience.
Based in Bath, UK
Skills Career Current ICX Personal
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Web Development + Web Design + Graphic Design + Animation

Technical skills

I pride myself on delivering modern, responsive, accessible applications with a focus on user experience.

I am passionate about what I do

I love writing code and designing solutions and APIs while keeping in mind the business strategy and overall picture. I have an eye for design and animation from the early part of my career creating customer facing Flash sites for some of the biggest brands in the world.

For the last decade, I have been building financial single page applications, built upon my own JavaScript MVCS framework; which is used to deliver large scale business critical enterprise applications to some of the largest companies in the financial world.


Client work and side projects

I work on projects for companies like CanadaLife and Aegon, big players in the UK's pension market. Both projects were similar in that we replaced either their entire Wealth Management Platform or a large proportion of it. Each sprint I planned the frontend work, pair programmed and guided the dev team through their frontend (and sometimes backend) tasks while also liaising with the client, ensuring that their requirements are in a dev ready state for the next sprint.

I am highly motivated and self-driven, working on internal side projects in-between my project responsibilities, some side projects are a direct result of current project needs, and others are big picture improvements for the entire product suite. All side projects are self started, and form most of the IntegroCX key features and commercial offering.

For example, over Xmas 2021, I rewrote all the CSS from the previous 6 years. Providing a new layered skinning architecture written with performance and overriding in mind, as well as modernising the look of all new projects via a white labelling approach, built upon Neomorphism.

And in 2022 I wrote my own compiler to allow screens in ICX to be written in HTML instead of JSON, to accompany this, I wrote an XSD schema which Development IDEs can interpret and provide intellisense and even validate directly in the code editor when writing screens. This not only improves the developer experience, but more importantly it massively reduces the barrier to entry for developers to work on ICX as it means developers can use their existing HTML and CSS skills.

Examples of my work.


My story

Career summary

I am an established professional,
I've been building web experiences for over 20 years

After University in 2002, I had a couple of ASP and SQL jobs, but my Frontend career really started in Melbourne, Australia in 2006 while backpacking, working for an advertising agency and then returning home to the UK and becoming a Senior Flash Developer at a creative agency in Bristol. After that, I contracted around Bristol and the South West. In that time I worked on projects for big clients and household names such as Nike, Mattel, Hertz, Estee Lauder, BP, Intel, Barbie and HotWheels to name a few, and I am proud to say that my work has been seen by millions of users across the world.

laptop

In 2011, I joined Digital Keystone, a small financial software company as a contract Flex Developer. At the time Digital Keystone had a single client and no product, but over the next three years, while helping grow the company, I built the underlying framework and frontend to an award-winning product called Adaptive Portal. In 2015, I was offered a partnership and became Head of Frontend Development and In 2016, we sold Digital Keystone in a multi-million pound merger to Dunstan Thomas, where I stayed on as the Group Head of Frontend Engineering. The frontend framework Adaptive Portal, that I built for Digital Keystone was renamed to IntegroCX, and is now the largest product in the suite offered by Dunstan Thomas and what we use to deliver most of our client projects.

In 2020, as a shareholder of Dunstan Thomas, I was once again involved in a major acquisition; and Dunstan Thomas was acquired by Curtis Banks, in another multi-million pound deal, roughly 10 times larger than the Digital Keystone deal. I continued on as the Group Head of Frontend Engineering.

Annual highlights

2022

Wrote my own compiler to allow screens in ICX to be written in HTML instead of JSON, to accompany this, I wrote an XSD schema which Development IDEs can interpret and provide intellisense and even validate directly in the code editor when writing screens. This not only improves the developer experience, but more importantly it massively reduces the barrier to entry for developers to work on ICX as it means developers can use their existing HTML and CSS skills.

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. Getting started with ICX Lite is as simple as downloading a zip file, and then running 5 node.js commands which would then spin up a server and set up FETest, my frontend testing framework built upon Cypress.io that does screenshot comparison.

2020

Dunstan Thomas was acquired by Curtis Banks, and I sold my shares. I also wrote a testing framework, based on Cypress.io which automatically captures and compares screenshots at different device sizes, performs a11y audits and validates performance. Images, showing before and after screens are now included in all Pull Requests which makes visual reviews at PR time possible, as well as automated, self generating visual site maps.

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.


Group Head of Frontend Engineering

Current position

I code, I build tools, I mentor and train developers, I write documentation, I run sales presentations, I decide features and act as product owner, I interview and build teams, I design...

Day to day leadership

As Group Head of Frontend Engineering I still develop and add features to the frontend Integro CX framework on which the majority of our projects are built. I also mentor and manage a team of Frontend developers with the goal of building a community with resilience, as well as supporting ~20 backend developers working across various projects across the organisation. I encourage innovation and lead by example, taking the longer more complex route of enhancing the core product in a generic way to benefit current and future projects rather than custom-coding a solution for a single project.

I hold regular team meetings providing a forum for all team members to discuss their projects, pain points, big wins and anything to share, and to demonstrate features I add to the framework. I use OKRs (Objectives Key Result) and Hackathons to encourage innovation and ring-fence developers time. I also produce a bi-monthly PDF, The Frontend Bulletin, which I share with the wider company so everyone is informed what the Frontend team are working on and what new features we are adding to IntegroCX.

Sales

I am also part of the sales pipeline and heavily involved in sales pitches and growing the company. I regularly present to clients and am comfortable in delivering presentations at the appropriate technical level. I have several slide decks prepared for prospects that I can customise just ahead of delivery, and I usually take the lead for the technical pitches. For a hackathon in 2021, I produced a sales/marketing video introducing ICX which is on YouTube, here.

Taking notes

Work experience

Group Head of Frontend Engineering

Dunstan Thomas
Permanent, Remote

Oct 2018 - Current

Head of Frontend development

Digital Keystone
Permanent, Remote

May 2015 - Oct 2018

Lead Frontend developer

Digital Keystone
Contract, Remote

Apr 2012 - May 2015

Flex developer

Digital Keystone
Contract, Bath

Mar 2011 - Apr 2012

Flash developer

GDS International
Contract, Bristol

Feb 2011 - Mar 2011

Flex developer

Estee Lauder
Contract, Bristol

Jul 2010 - Dec 2010

Flash developer

Oakwood DC
Contract, Bristol

May 2010 - Jul 2010

Flash developer

Enable Interactive
Contract, Bristol

Apr 2010 - May 2010

Technical lead

Oakwood DC
Contract, Bristol

Feb 2010 - Apr 2010

Flash developer

Enable Interactive
Contract, Bristol

Dec 2009 - Jan 2010

Flash developer

Bay Leino
Contract, Remote

Aug 2009 - Oct 2009

Technical lead

Oakwood DC
Contract, Bristol

Feb 2009 - Aug 2009

Senior Flash developer

Oakwood DC
Permanent, Bristol

Feb 2007 - Feb 2009

Backpacking...

Web developer

Publicis Mojo
Contract, Melbourne

Jan 2006 - May 2006

Backpacking...

Web developer

Sol-Tec
Permanent, Reading

Apr 2003 - Apr 2005

Web developer

Strudwick & Young
Permanent, Reading

Jul 2002 - Feb 2003

Graduated university...

Web designer

ACS
Contract, Remote

Sep 2001 - May 2002

Web designer

ACS
Permanent, High Wycombe

May 2000 - Jul 2001
My framework

About IntegroCX

IntegroCX is a big part of my career, I have been building it for the past decade. It is a low code framework for delivering dashboard and form based single page applications.


Intro

Integro CX was renamed from The Adaptive Portal, which I began building while I was working for Digital Keystone. It is a low code framework for delivering dashboard and form based single page applications, low code (on the frontend) from when I was the lone frontend developer supporting multiple projects for some years at Digital Keystone, but still valid at Dunstan Thomas where we have a much smaller frontend team compared to the backend. This means the frontend is entirely configurable from JSON templates which describe dashboard layouts and what is on each form and is capable of fine control over client side validation and dynamic rules.
Making such a configurable frontend requires a robust and flexible architecture, which I also built myself; an MVCS (Model View Commands Signals) framework based on Knockout.js, but adding all the necessary parts such as Routing, Dependency Management/Injection, PubSub via Signals for events and messaging, and the Command Pattern for sequencing. This enables entire systems to be prototyped and built through configuration and a bit of styling, rather than custom coding, which is reserved for new features and even those are assessed to see if they can be delivered via new configurations or features in the core framework to benefit future projects.

Sales & API design

A case study I use in sales calls to demonstrate the power of ICX, is that I was able to build a working 12 screen prototype, based on wireframes, in less than a week. This included custom branding, responsive, a11y compliant screens, a dashboard and multi-screen workflow, with interactive graphs and sliders and full test coverage. Production ready, just needing a backend.

As primary architect of the IntegroCX frontend, I design and maintain an API I built from the ground up, my goal is to make using ICX as effortless as possible for the Frontend development teams that consume it. I believe in making it so "it just works" as the developer expects.
Over the years I have learnt and refined how I do this, good API design is key, but backwards compatibility means compromises also have to be made and this is where documentation and testing really helps. So I wrote a markdown file consuming documentation system that automatically generates live interactive examples from manifest files used to describe the various components of ICX and a hash url, screenshot comparison based battery of end-to-end tests that can be invoked using a command line interface tool.


My framework

Outside of work

I'm happy for you to find out about me as a person. I am married with two kids and a puppy; feel free to check me out on: Facebook, Twitter, Strava or LinkedIn, my posts, likes and comments reflect who I am in my personal life.

Remote

I have been working remotely since 2012, attending a few meetings a year but otherwise working entirely from home, first in Bristol, then from Spain and now from Bath. I have no problem with maintaining productivity and have been a disciplined self-starter since University, demonstrated by graduating top of my class in 2002.

Education

1998 - 2002: De Montfort University Leicester
Multimedia Computing: 1st BSc (Hons) - top of my class

1997-1998: Amersham & Wycombe College
A-levels: Computing (A), Maths (D), Physics (D)

1992-1997: Holmer Green Upper School
GCSE: 9 x grade C or above

Personal life

I met my wife Lorraine while travelling in Thailand. We have two kids, Daisy and Henry and live in Bath, but have strong connections to Spain as we spent 3 years living there. I enjoy spending time with my family, riding my bikes (either road or mountain) and being outdoors as much as possible. We also have a puppy, Bobby who's a Jug (Jack Russel / Pug).

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