Coding since 1993. Full-stack engineer, designer, product person. Enjoys crafting products that elevate users. Ex-CTO of a Series A health-tech startup.
I specialise in going beyond the "full-stack" — crafting tech products and user experiences from conceptualisation, product research, UI design, to building reactive frontend clients, architecting backend APIs, to deployment, monitoring, and third-party integrations.
Having worked with Javascript frameworks from Ember.js to Vue for over 12 years, I bring with me a deep understanding of frontend subtleties, and best practices. At the same time, I like having a hand in a broad base of disciplines, be it backend APIs and services with Rails, Node, or serverless architectures, as well as UI design and UX.
As a Business / Economics graduate, I also have an interest in data and statistics, and cannot help but consider real-world business needs and human psychology even while solving technical problems.
I've found that being able to simultaneously play the role of product manager, designer, and engineer leads me to create robust products with great speed, and allows me to communicate with investors, management, or designers and engineers in my team with empathy.
I take pride in creating enjoyable user experiences and derive satisfaction from seeing users easily pick up an app, become more awesome, and then tell us how much it changed their lives.
I served as CTO of a Series A health-tech startup, doing everything from design & coding, to hiring & product management, to devops, financial analysis, & data science
As CTO, I designed, built, and laid the groundwork for an interaction-rich Javascript mobile app with near-native animations, gestures, and performance.
As with any new project and startup, thousands of design and architectural decisions had to be made with regard to audience, UX, design language, frameworks, plugins, services, code structure and organisation, etc.
The App Store and Play Store apps have since been revamped, but you can walk-through them in a microsite I created explaining the product from a more tech / product angle.
The customer-facing mobile app is paired with a fully-featured admin web app that is optimised for efficiency.
Together with an API, I had to lay out a complex system of backend jobs, integrations with 3rd parties and various microservices with node.js, Puppeteer, AWS Lambda and Firebase.
Although historically not my forte, I also had to dive into devops, set up services, optimise for performance, fix memory leaks, etc.
Healthcare is probably the most complex vertical I've been exposed to, being deeply personal yet also having a huge breadth of issues and stakeholders.
In the course of the work I got to pick up knowledge from an entirely new domain, and also had the chance to apply statistics and econometrics knowledge to nibble away at data science topics, build financial models, and even contribute in a small way to a research paper publication.
Management is always the biggest challenge and an area where I am continually learning the most. Figuring out a product direction and roadmap is difficult enough, and project management complex enough, but hiring, mentoring, and managing a team is one of the hardest (but most rewarding) parts.
In this role, I am very grateful for the opportunity to have managed and mentored engineers, product designers, and data analysts, of varying seniorities.
I had the pleasure of working with Peter [...] and he demonstrated a unique ability to straddle product management, design, and engineering. Peter played a pivotal role in creating a tech product from scratch, showcasing his strong vision and technical expertise.
He worked with the team to understand market and consumer needs and translated the insight from ideation to product launch. Peter's leadership style encouraged the team to think critically, and ensured that products were shipped at a high standard consistently.
Peter's contributions not only led to a successful product launch but also instilled a culture of excellence within the company.
Kyle Tan,
NOVI Health Founder
Inspired by Stefan Sagmeister, I decided to take a sabbatical to learn new skills, explore the projects I’ve always wanted to do, and further my other passions, while taking on the occasional contract & freelance work.
Before Notion existed, I wanted to solve a personal pain — formatting markdown in Github without having to toggle to preview, so I built a web-based text editor (actually really difficult) that parses Markdown in real-time and in-place.
Based loosely on the Routable Components RFC, I’m authoring an Ember addon that allows routes to render components directly, removing the need for controllers and simplifying routing in general.
View Demo / DocsI worked remotely for Ticketsolve, an established SaaS startup based in the UK and Europe, modernising a family of legacy ticketing apps with Ember.js
Early on, I helped migrate a legacy app to ES6, Ember CLI, and ember-cli-deploy, and appreciated the chance to implement new processes, coding styles, and best practices from my experience with Ember.
One interesting feature I created was a seat selection tool, which had to be performant on both desktop and mobile and handle a variety of scenarios and business needs.
I then took on the conceptualisation, redesign and development of a small legacy mobile app into a performant Ember mobile web app — complete with “Offline Mode” using AppCache, WebSockets sync, and barcode scanning.
I appreciated the freedom to design and build, as well as the challenge of creating a native-like experience for the mobile web.
Finally, I collaborated on a complete revamp of a huge SaaS app — a rare chance to put all my experience into structuring a brand new Ember app with best practices — in a way that scales easily, avoids complexity, is future-proof, yet doesn’t compromise on user experience.
I also played a product manager / lead role — digging up user stories and needs from the customer-facing team, pushing UX further with the designer, debating the API approach, all in addition to leading the frontend development.
Hit by startup fever and surrounded by people working at startups, I wanted to try my hand at starting something too. While it ultimately didn’t work out, I still learnt a lot.
I conceptualised, designed and built a gym & dance or yoga studio management app prototype (as an MVP), as the competitors at that time were clunky, legacy systems. I reached out to studios and ran customer interviews with them, before eventually deciding to move on.
While I’ve been coding since I was 7, my first job was being the first employee at TradeGecko, a SaaS startup in the complex order & inventory management industry.
I helped design and build TradeGecko’s flagship product — and as the first employee, had a direct influence in the startup’s vision and growth. As part of a small team, customer support was also an integral part of the work.
As the team grew exponentially, I began focussing on restructuring, establishing best practices and processes, code reviews, and mentoring newer developers.
Peter [...] has been a massive contributor to both the growth and direction of the TradeGecko products, as well as a great asset to the company as a whole.
A great engineer with very strong skills in EmberJS, he was also a massive driver of the UI design, product flows and a huge proponent of incorporating customer feedback into our product direction. He would be a great asset to any team.
Bradley Priest,
TradeGecko CTO