The Bespoke Pixel

The web was changing, and I chose to change with it. I think the release of Git and the arrival of GitHub sent me in a different direction. Now able to more easily collaborate and share code, it became apparent that the structures and processes we place around our code were evolving. Large web-based projects such as Facebook, Google and YouTube demonstrated what those projects could achieve, instantly surpassing the incumbents such as MySpace and Friends Reunited, sites built on obviously unmaintainable code bases.

As such, I turned my attention to more tooling and library creation in my work. I was still working on some music projects for Pink Floyd, David Gilmour and Icelandic band Sigur Rós, but they were becoming more grown up, and our aims changed — gone were Flash and Shockwave, replaced with ideas of interoperability and more formal user experience and journeys. I found myself architecting larger systems and generating frameworks that could be used more cleanly across multiple projects. I remember waking up one morning to find Apple had removed Flash tracks from QuickTime, rendering the past decade’s best work redundant and inaccessible.

Then the iPhone appeared, presenting a whole host of exciting new challenges — the change of application focus from user to task. It wasn’t a case of just entertaining the user anymore; it needed to be useful. I created several libraries that assisted in making the design ‘responsive’ — it wasn’t called that then, but that’s exactly what I was doing. My sites and apps needed a consistent experience, which meant I had to understand what the code was doing in situations I couldn’t observe myself, so my work switched from observational to more test-driven and unit-tested. My code became more modular, using the JavaScript module pattern widely, allowing cleaner assembly for different jobs.

With mobile tech quickly becoming popular, traditional media, such as books, became digital. I worked with HarperCollins to make early ebooks more fun, creating a library called ‘GestureKit’, which could inject state management into an eBook’s ‘spine’. This meant I could update content as the user read. For instance, in the A Game of Thrones enhanced ePub you could call up the map of Westeros, showing where different characters were located — or, in others, play games and solve puzzles that reinforced the narrative as you read.

I was also active across several open source projects and learnt the basics of working in the agile framework.

Other work quickly became my full-time focus — Voicescript, then ByteTree. However, I’m still delivering projects such as Stonehenge ‘Skyscape’ for English Heritage, which I carry on as a hobby in my spare time today.