Chad Tomkiss

After freelancing for 2 years, I started to miss being surrounded by like minded people and was presented with the opportunity to join an award winning agency in London, UK.

I have been responsible for the delivering the new Cleanipedia, a multi-lingual site for expert cleaning tips.

One of the frustrations of the old platform came from the complexity of running advertising campaigns across multiple markets. We developed a solution that enabled Unilever to specify the brands for each market and their relation to the subject of an article. This enabled the site to automatically deliver the most relevant products to the viewer that would help them accomplish the task at hand.

We improved page load time by 52% as a result of using responsive imagery, CSS sprites and significantly reducing the need for external JS libraries. As a result, users engaged with the site a lot more than they did previously. Yay!

With a number of friends enjoying the flexibility that came with freelance life, I saved up a 3 month buffer and decided to give it a shot myself. I was fortunate enough to work with a variety of clients from agencies to product based start ups.

For 6 months I travelled Europe using Airbnb. All you need is an internet connection right? It taught me to not only be self sufficient, but that your best work doesn't always happen during the 9-5 norm.

I built bespoke apps using Laravel and collobrated with a friend to deliver an API driven iOS app for Ruuby, a beauty concierge based in London, UK.

I worked on a product called ClickSure, an affiliate network. This was my first "but does it scale?" project that involved multiple app and database servers in order to handle large volumes of transations.

The project also utilised background processing in order to calculate payouts to both sellers and affiliates on a weekly basis.

For rendering analytical charts to showcase campaign performance, we utilised Chart.js alongside BackBone which allowed us to easily update the UI based on user interaction.