CV, Michael Pallister
I have over a decades worth of experience working in the industry after graduating from Teesside University with a degree in Web Design.
I've worked with everyone from small agencies to large companies and in teams of varying sizes. I like semantics, performance and the little details.
Over the years I've gained experience working with a range of languages and technologies. I have listed some of these below. Outside of work, in my free time I enjoy keeping up with the Jamstack community, improving my accessibility knowledge and the possibilities around edge computing.
Stinkyink - Senior Frontend Developer
January 2022 - Present
Stinkyink is one of the largest ink and toner retailers in the UK.
I've massively improved the performance of the web app. The average page size has more than halved with no real change to the content or design on these pages.
I've also built an internal browser extension that helps the customer services team with some of their daily tasks.
I'm also forming some brand guidelines, a component library, planning the migration of a extensive legacy codebase to Typescript, creating a test suite for the frontend, building out any new features required, re-designing and building internal dashboards and helping with an architecture review and upgrade.
Northern Stable - Senior Frontend Developer
June 2021 - December 2022
Northern Stable would invest in ideas and build products that people could take into the world and help them gain further funding through investment or sales.
I helped launch the UK's fastest-growing digital appointments app, a referral network, a suite of products aimed at converting customers in the e-commerce and gambling industries and a video email SaaS web app and browser extension.
I would also support the companies that had gained successful funding and started building their dev teams with their frontend needs. This could be a feature that needs writing, consultation on an idea, help planning upcoming features, API design or any questions they had.
CookiesHQ - Senior Frontend Developer
March 2021 - June 2021
I worked across a range of products whilst working at Cookies. I helped build an interactive video platform that worked like Netflix's Bandersnatch where the user can decide the journey the film they're watching would take.
I also worked with the BBC to develop the BBC Maestro video content platform, providing online video courses from some of the most famous names across the world.
I also created the initial web and iOS app MVP for a senior citizen monitoring health app. The app, aimed at care homes and families who wanted to monitor their relatives would provide alerts to a user should certain conditions not be met. The app gained successful funding from a Canadian health organisation.
CEF - Senior Frontend Developer
May 2017 - March 2021
I helped the business transition its presence online from a B2B only company to a B2B/B2C company.
Being the largest electrical wholesaler in the UK we had to ensure that the change wouldn't cause any issues for our existing business customers, whilst fulfilling the demands and expectations of our new customers who were shopping with us for the first time.
My role involved a lot of performance work, focussing on driving down the page size, increasing the speed and optimising the customer journey.
I was also responsible for starting the frontend component library, mentoring junior developers and helping any other colleagues with any queries they had related to the frontend of the website.
We also rolled out the company's first mobile app on both Apple and Android devices. I was heavily involved in building out the frontend of the app in React Native and the API that went with it.
Before leaving, I was also part of a small team that was tasked with a massive technical upgrade across the whole stack.
Visualsoft - Senior Frontend Developer
April 2013 - May 2017
As part of the R&D team I was responsible for improving and modernising a large codebase. I'd be looking to always be ahead of the curve in e-commerce by providing features and updates for our clients that meant they would stay ahead in their markets.
I helped plan and build the company's first responsive website, this then led to re-writing the component library to be responsive so we could roll the new designs out to our clients.
I was also part of a small team that created the coding standards documentation for all developers and the linting rules.
Teesside University - Web Developer
September 2012 - April 2013
I was responsible for maintaining and developing the University's website and internal tools, taking ideas from a prototype to a finished feature. I was designing and working across the full stack.
Alongside this, I was helping build a completely bespoke CMS that allowed internal departments to update the areas of the website they owned.
Writing internal tooling, building dashboards and reports that allowed departments to visualise the data we were collecting was a big part of the job.
Visualsoft - Web Developer
Jul 2010 - September 2012
I helped build the customer knowledge base. This would allow customers to search for their questions before submitting them to the support team. These changes resulted in the number tickets we had drastically falling and meant the support team could focus more on the customers who needed support instead of "how-to" type questions.
I was also initially creating sites from PSDs supplied by the in-house design team. I started to noticed a lot of repeat components and features. Because of this I started to document my findings. I was then moved into a role where I was tasked with building out the first version of a component library. The library would later be used by all the development teams to reduce the build time of any project.