Retrospective: What I'd Do Differently if I Rebuilt HCD Today
Looking back on my time at Holiday Caravans Direct (HCD), I'm proud of what I built. As a solo developer, I designed and implemented a...
Lessons from Managing Non-Technical Clients in a Technical World
At Holiday Caravans Direct (HCD), one of the most persistent challenges I faced wasn't code-related — it was communication. I worked...
The Booking Engine That Could: Handling Custom Pricing and Preferences at Scale
When I began developing the booking engine for Holiday Caravans Direct (HCD), I knew it would need to do more than just store bookings....
The Reality of Building a Full SaaS Product Solo
When people think of building a SaaS product, they often imagine a team of engineers, designers, product owners, and testers working...
Why I Replaced jQuery with Vue.js — And Never Looked Back
When I first inherited the front end at Holiday Caravans Direct (HCD), it was built using a mix of jQuery, Knockout.js, and traditional...
Why I Still Believe in the Web Forms to MVC Rewrite: A Case for Transitional Architecture
Modernisation projects are often framed in extremes: you either rewrite everything from scratch or do nothing at all. But real-world...
White-Labelling at Scale: The Challenge Behind the BenPal Portal
One of the most technically rewarding challenges I faced at JLT Development was architecting support for white-labelling within the...
Why I Push Back on SQL-Driven Architectures (and When They Still Make Sense)
If there's one architectural debate that seems to resurface in every project, it's whether business logic belongs in the application...
Designing a Booking Calendar That Doesn't Break Under Load
One of the most technically demanding features I built at Holiday Caravans Direct (HCD) was the booking calendar. It sounds simple on the...
The Moment I Realised I Was Leading, Not Just Coding
It didn't happen in a meeting. It wasn't announced with a title. There was no handover, no ceremony. But one day at Activus, mid-project,...
The Power of SpecFlow and BDD in Real-World .NET Projects
In many organisations, Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) and tools like SpecFlow are mentioned with enthusiasm but rarely implemented...
Architectural Storytelling with Diagrams: Why Flow Beats Structure
In architectural discussions, diagrams are often treated as a formality—a box-ticking exercise for documentation. But I see them...