Harrison Max-Wilson

A leading UK B2B e-commerce and catalogue business, selling health, safety and facilities products through around 24 brands, with more than 200 staff and in-house manufacturing in Poole.

• Maintain and optimise the group’s customer-facing e-commerce platforms across its brand portfolio, ensuring high availability and strong performance.
• Deliver features across the full stack, from Laravel and Symfony back ends through to Vue.js and Tailwind CSS front ends.

Key achievements

• Developed an internal CMS platform to replace an outsourced system after the vendor quoted almost £40,000 a year for its enterprise plan, matching it like for like with extra features on top, and wrote migration software to make the transition painless for everyone involved.
• Building an in-house administration system for the group’s entire product, category and pricing ecosystem, replacing dated tooling for the e-commerce and marketing teams with snappier, cleaner web technology built around a new in-house API.
• Personally led the build of a new e-commerce engine on that same API, working with the other developers to improve delivery windows and keeping stakeholders updated and involved throughout. Finished and working, it includes a brand new checkout system and improvements to performance, security, SEO and accessibility.
• Early adopter of AI within the business, using it to speed up delivery and add AI-driven improvements to existing systems. The tooling and practices introduced are now used by the entire IT team day to day.
• Promoted to Senior Software Developer in recognition of independently taking business requirements from initial scoping through to finished end-to-end products, regularly adding quality-of-life improvements beyond the brief.

Provider of a complete, connected cinema and venue management platform, serving independent cinemas through to enterprise chains across the UK and Europe.

• Developed and maintained the full cinema ticketing and back-office suite for multiple cinema clients, covering point-of-sale, stock management and film display platforms.
• Built the company’s COVID-19 response features, including click-and-collect food and beverage ordering and kitchen display screens for chef ticketing, helping cinema clients keep trading through restrictions.

Key achievements

• Pushed early for the move away from ageing languages such as Visual Basic 6, which were taking up excessive development hours building in-house equivalents of features that modern web technologies offer out of the box.
• Moved much of the original Visual Basic 6 codebase into modern web-based equivalents, paving the way for later development changes to POS devices and kiosk systems. The company adopted this way of working more widely and continued with it long after.
• Initiated and architected the foundations of a customer-facing self-service kiosk system, which the company went on to launch.

The world’s number one provider of drilling and well-control simulators, with more than 1,600 deployed worldwide for clients including Shell, Chevron and Halliburton.

• Developed and maintained drilling-simulation software used to train oil-drilling operatives in a safe, off-site environment, working on everything from the mathematical physics engines through to operator-facing interfaces.
• Debugged issues across every layer of the stack, including simulation physics logic, 3D rendering and texture faults, within large legacy C++ and FORTRAN codebases.
• Delivered client-facing tools that improved the training experience and overall system usability.

Key achievements

• Helped bring a rapidly growing bug and issue backlog under control as part of a newly formed independent maintenance team, reaching the point where new issues in legacy and new code were resolved as quickly as they were found.
• Kept the backlog low enough that the team could take on development work offloaded from the wider software team, despite being new and relatively inexperienced at the time.