I'm a London based full-stack developer with a breadth of experience
across industries, from early stage product startups to marketing
agencies. I'm happiest writing clean, functional code, solving real
business needs and streamlining operations.
I've been working with React, node and friends for over a decade
now, but I've got experience integrating with and contributing to
services written in a wide range of stacks/languages.
If you're working in a functional language such as Elixir or
Clojure I'd be particularly interested to hear from you.
AI Labs: In 2023 I was approached by Oak to help them take
their LLM experiments from prototype scripts to production
services. We launched 2 new AI tools to assist teachers, utilizing
a novel approach of streaming structured LLM responses to the
browser to improve the UX of long-running prompts. Productionising
these entailed instrumenting and adding observability, reporting,
custom back-office dashboards and service hardening. Ultimately
the experiments proved successful and Oak are now integrating the
AI features into their main apps.
Stack: Next.js, Postgres (w/ Prisma), Clerk, Inngest, Langhcain,
Retool, tRPC
Prior to the AI project I worked with Oak on a number of different
projects, spanning the entirety of their tech stack. One highlight
was redeveloping and re-launching their asset downloads
experience. By enabling bulk downloads of entire lessons or
collections of lessons, and streamlining the (fully accessible) UI,
we were able to save teachers a lot of time. On the back-end, the
service was extended to zip bundles of assets together,
intelligently caching them to reduce download times.
Zero-1 are Corporate Venture Builder & Startup Studio, giving me
the opportunity to work on both their established businesses and
new startups.
Lifted care: Lifted care provide in-home care, facilitated
by both client and carer-facing apps and complex backoffice
software. I worked with Lifted to add and improve features in
their react native apps, react based admin webapps, carer payroll
calculation and reporting workflows
Aside from Lifted I worked on Zero-1's other experiments,
iterating quickly to try and validate product viability. Another
large part of my responsibilities was supporting their junior
developers through mentoring, pair programming and code review.
Created a web app to wrap Zappar’s WebAR experience, handling
all non-AR user flows and integrating with a third-party
provided backend. Tight integration with the AR experience meant
finding ways to keep the react state and ThreeJS contexts in
sync.
Implemented a custom authentication/access control system across
the serverless stack, CMS and Next.js app. Deep sanity
integration for user group and permission management.
Created an interactive learning experience for medical
professionals to learn about new immunotherapy treatments.
Implemented in React as a game-like experience with branching
learning paths, with each state and path declaratively
represented in a dependency graph.
Built large scale innovative campaigns for clients such as the
UN, sporting celebrities and musicians. Rapid prototyping of
campaigns in conjunction with creatives.
Built the early stages of a platform to help charities and
business better measure and report their social impact. Worked
closely with designers and stakeholders to rapidly prototype and
test features.
Skills: React, Node, MongoDB, Product design
Kota Creative (2014)
Led development on a host of websites for clients in the
hospitality sector.
Skills: Front-end, Wordpress
FuelStory / Converge Collective (2013)
Worked on the rebranding and strategy for a rapidly growing
London coworking space and prototyped a number of small apps and
websites, handling everything from design to competitor research
and market analysis.
Skills: Prototyping, Front-end, Design, Research
More work experience available online at
rossmackay.co
Education
BA Digital Media Design (2012 - 2015)
London College of Communication
Skills: Creative coding, hardware, motion graphics, 3D, video
editing