In this role I was one of the lead engineers in the team developing Canva’s photo editor, a feature with over 40 million monthly users (Canva has around 220 million monthly users).

• Drove various foundational improvements to increase development velocity and unblock important user-facing features

• Established tracing and telemetry in our part of the codebase using Canva’s custom implementation of the OpenTelemetry API, a key stepping stone to enterprise customers and eventual IPO

• Helped out with team lead duties such as running sprints, as well as putting in place processes to scale these responsibilities to share them around the team beyond myself, giving our team lead time to focus on more impactful activities

After some time developing landing pages I was asked to lead landing pages foundations development within the marketing technology business area.

• Worked on core technologies and a base component library used across all of Canva’s landing pages across multiple teams

• Together with a digital designer, set up a marketing-focused variant of Canva’s design system which was more tailored to the slightly looser, more varied requirements of landing pages (as opposed to the UI of the main Canva product)

• Responsible for the landing pages work for the Canva for Teams product launch, designing and implementing a rollout strategy which could be rolled back smoothly if any issues arose. This product is a key aspect of Canva’s B2B customer engagement

The goal of this team was to help DNV’s clients to digitise their businesses, developing web applications to demonstrate how digital transformation can unlock new business areas and efficiencies in traditional industries such as maritime and oil and gas. This work usually entailed independent full-stack development.

• One of my favourite projects was developing a suite of data visualisation features using D3 within a python web application tool for designing wind farms and wind turbines, allowing data to be automatically plotted to custom dashboards within the web application.

• Another fun project was being lead developer working with a startup building a DotNetCore/MongoDB/React web application to replace paperwork in vessel refueling with smart contracts in a blockchain.

During and after university I worked as a mechanical engineer in London, undertaking complex engineering analyses of offshore structures, including meteorological, structural and geotechnical concerns and writing detailed technical reports. After moving to Singapore with DNV, I eventually began to move towards software engineering, eventually developing a prototype data management and visualisation web application for the oil and gas industry together with an industry expert. The idea was to digitise existing numerical, GIS and textual data to make better use of historical records for upcoming engineering operations. We were able to secure internal funding, but unfortunately couldn’t find market fit for the idea.