I find the real problem, then build the simplest system that solves it.

Gate

Check-in that takes care of itself

GWSI · four warehouses · in production

A warehouse is a building trucks come to. Before anyone can unload one, somebody has to establish what is on it and where it is supposed to go. At GWSI that happened at a window: the driver walked up, and a member of staff typed five to seven pieces of information into a computer while the driver read them out.

Two things made that slow. Drivers frequently don’t speak English and the staff at the window only do. And the reference number that identifies the load — the one piece of information everything else hangs off — is the piece drivers most often have wrong. So it went: wrong number, look it up, that’s not it, wait while the driver digs through paperwork for another one. Three attempts was normal. Each warehouse kept its own record of all of this in its own spreadsheet.

I moved check-in onto the driver’s phone. The form checks the reference number against the warehouse’s own system before it will submit, so a driver with the wrong number is told immediately, along with where on their paperwork the right one is. Once it goes through, the load appears on a live board the staff work from: who has arrived, which dock door they’re assigned, how loading is going, how long they have been waiting. Managers get the numbers underneath — door usage, wait times, and how close trucks arrive to the time they promised.

SvelteKit · TypeScript · Supabase · Vercel · Vitest · Playwright

Vanguard

Paperwork that can’t drift out of sync

GWSI · four warehouses · in production

Some imported freight enters the country before duty has been paid on it. It sits in a bonded warehouse under US Customs rules, and those rules are strict: at any moment you have to be able to say which items are still under bond, which have been released, and where each one physically sits in the building. Inspectors arrive unannounced and expect that answer on the spot.

Four warehouses were answering it four different ways, out of spreadsheets and email threads. Nothing reconciled against anything else. Close to a quarter of records disagreed with reality. The annual filing to Customs took days or weeks to put together, most of it spent working out which version of which spreadsheet to believe.

I built one application that all four warehouses use for the same job: logging freight into bond, releasing it back out, and holding the paperwork attached to both. Notifications to customers and to Customs happen as part of the process rather than being somebody’s job to remember. When two records disagree, the system raises it that day instead of in December. The year-end report builds itself.

PHP 8.1+ · MySQL 8.0+ · Composer · Node

Relay

The emails nobody has to write

GWSI · four markets · in production

A warehouse holds freight belonging to other companies, and every one of those companies wants to be told something slightly different when their freight moves. One wants a spreadsheet, formatted their way, attached to an email, every time a truck is unloaded — thirty-plus times a day across the four markets. Another wants photographs, part numbers, and serial numbers any time something arrives damaged. There are hundreds of customers and each has their own version of this.

Staff were doing all of it by hand, which meant the person confirming a load also had to carry hundreds of customers’ preferences in their head, and build the file, and write the email, and get it right, every time.

Relay watches the warehouse system for one thing: a member of staff confirming that freight has arrived or shipped. When that happens, whatever that customer’s rules say should follow — the email, the spreadsheet in their format, the photos with the serial numbers attached — happens without anyone deciding to do it. Staff handle the freight. The rules live in the system instead of in people.

Bun workspace monorepo · TypeScript · Cloudflare Workers · Wrangler

DePuy Synthes iOS

Hundreds of thousands of documents, offline, in a 5MB app

DePuy Synthes / Johnson & Johnson · North America and Europe · 15+ years in production

DePuy Synthes makes surgical implants and the instruments used to fit them. Their sales reps, and the surgeons those reps support, need product documents, training material, and video — and they need it while standing in a hospital, where the signal is usually gone. The material lived on scattered servers and travelled by email, so reps rarely had the current version of anything and had no way to tell whether they did.

The answer was two native iOS apps sharing one content engine: one for North America, one for Europe, each with its own branding and its own legal requirements. I was lead frontend developer on both and built the pipeline that pushed all content into them.

Two pieces made it work. SAMM was the content management system — I designed, built, and maintained it through version 2.0 — and it let J&J staff assemble product presentations and publish updates themselves, with no developer involved and no App Store release. MUNCH read the entire document library every night, PDFs and video transcripts included, and compressed it into a searchable database small enough to travel with the daily sync. A rep in a hospital basement with no bars could search every document the company had. I worked on MUNCH as a support engineer.

PHP · MySQL · JavaScript · HTML/CSS in a native iOS shell

Food Safety

The binder is gone

GWSI · four warehouses · maintained by the coordinator

Warehouses that store food get inspected, without warning, against documentation they are required to keep current. At GWSI that documentation was more than a hundred Word, Excel, and PDF files spread across four sites, all maintained by one person. The same document existed in several places in several versions. A full update happened about once a year and took weeks. Because inspectors turn up unannounced, every site also kept a printed copy — a thousand-page binder, expensive to produce and out of date the week after it came off the printer.

I converted every document to Markdown and published the whole set on the company’s public website, rendered from those same files, so there is one version of each and it is always the current one. Then I set up a separate repository for the Food Safety Coordinator, taught her Git and Markdown, and handed it over. She edits a document when the document changes and sends it as a pull request. The binders went in the recycling.

Markdown · mdsvex · SvelteKit

Rollcall

Attendance that takes itself

Drexel UXID · in production

Taking attendance in a lecture means either stopping what you are doing to do it, or reconstructing it afterwards from memory. The university’s approved tools want the instructor to mark every student by hand, and the five minutes before class — the only window there is for it — is exactly when students are lined up asking questions.

Students scan a QR code on the way in, sign in with their Drexel email and student ID, and are marked present or late by the clock. Rosters import from a spreadsheet, sessions open and close on a timer, and the list fills in live while the room does.

The part that changed behaviour wasn’t the attendance. Arrival order also builds the queue for after-class one-on-ones: first in, first seen. Students started showing up early.

SvelteKit · TypeScript · Tailwind · Supabase · Vercel

Whitney Gallery

The field trip, when there could be no field trips

Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience, University of Florida · 2020

The Whitney Lab is a marine biology research station on the Florida coast. Part of what it does is run tours for third through fifth graders from schools near enough to drive there, and part of its funding is attached to running them. Covid ended the tours, and the funding with them.

I was lead designer and developer, and one of three instructional designers, on three online modules covering what the tours covered in person: mud snails, estuaries, and conservation. We worked from the lab’s own scientists rather than from a textbook. A teacher can run a module over a video call and talk a class through it, or a student can work through it alone, on whatever device is in the house. There is a launch page and an admin panel so the lab controls what is open and when.

Two things came out of it that the in-person tour couldn’t do. The lab had something concrete to show donors during a year when it had nothing else to show them. And the audience stopped being limited to schools within driving distance of the building.

React · PHP · MySQL