As a developer Garry embodies the spirit of the passionate autodidact. He is always searching for the best technology for a given problem yet manages never to lose sight of the importance of delivery and maintainability.
He prides himself on his willingness to listen, depth of understanding, breadth of experience, speed of response and quality of production.
Below is a brief summary of his professional evolution, from enthusiastic hobbyist to professional full-stack developer with nearly 30 years experience.
Please get in touch.
Currently in development is an open-source multi-room audio system powered by Raspberry Pis, Elixir, Elm and the Nerves embedded software platform.
A fault-tolerant, distributed, scalable, resumable-upload system written in Go, heavily utilising NSQ message queues and deployed using Ansible.
For the last couple of years I've also been lucky enough to be involved as a senior developer with Opendesk, helping them to achieve their aim of revolutionising manufacturing. My responsibilities have been user interface/experience design and helping to re-develop the main company website (and associated projects) using Spontaneous.
A qualitiative market research tool that allows participants to upload video dairies, photos, audio clips and longer free-form text responses to client briefs.
Spontaneous CMS is a powerful yet intuitive CMS framework developed exclusively by Magnetised. Spontaneous is built using Ruby and leverages a powerful form of single table inheritance to map data onto content types that define custom fields and behaviours.
The latest, open source, version of Spontaneous powers the following websites:
Opendesk. Opendesk is a global platform for local making. You can use it to download, make and buy work space furniture.
OpenMaking.is a public domain resource developing open standards in keeping with new and social forms of design and manufacturing.
Kitmonsters. Kitmonsters features in-depth interviews with musicians about their craft and their kit. It brings you exclusive videos, tips, exciting new music tech, and competitions - we talk to new bands, rising stars, gurus and producers. It is a collaboration between magnetised and Terry Tyldesley.
Albert. The home of environmental sustainability for the UK screen arts. Designed and developed by Magnetised for BAFTA
Soda. Mashing up the physical and digital worlds for culture and learning. Designed & developed by Magnetised.
Carbon Visuals was startup dedicated to communicating the realities of global warming through concrete visualisation. Many projects required pushing the boundaries of web technology of the time, for example this embeddable widget required porting the modelling code from OpenGL to Javascript for rendering 3D objects into an HTML5 Canvas element.
As web technology progressed and WebGL became more widely available we were able to utilise Three.js to provide real-time 3D visualisations.
Managing a small-but-growing design shop based on the technology behind Spontaneous and beautiful design.
Our largest project was a re-launch of the Design Museum Shop which a custom e-commerce solution built on top of Spontaneous CMS, which resulted in a beautiful and fast-loading e-commerce site.
We were also responsible for the re-design of the very popular Dezeen design blog.
Living and working in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Learning Spanish, making cocktails, writing travel guides. Developing a crazy pet-project based on simulated leaf-cutter ants eating a virtual internet and making poetry...
Also, freelance web-development including:
A re-design of the Design Museum website powered by the first version of Spontaneous CMS, written in Rails 1.1.6
irrepressible.info. Part of a campaign combating online censorship by Amnesty International. Developed in Python using Turbo Gears v1 and including a ‘fragment’ publishing system based on pre-rendered snippets randomly selected using a small JavaScript library embedded into external sites. This site survived a slash-dotting.
A bespoke CMS system for managing the D&AD website. Programmed in Perl and XSLT it was fairly eccentric but taught me a lot about the power of code generation.
A small art project dedicated to re-envisioning plastic waste as something beautiful: Human Remains.
Lots of fun in a pre-ADSL world, programming interactive CD-ROMs and producing product interface prototypes.
Also responsible for the first version of the Easy Art poster site (now kingandmcgaw.com) powered by PHP4 beta and MySQL.
The start of a long collboration with Tim Diggins at RED56.
Responsible for a diverse range of technologies and clients, including desktop publishing in QuarkXPress, installation and administration of a company email/dev server based on yggdrasil linux and large amounts of hand-crafted HTML.
Working with the AudioROM art collective, I was responsible for the PC port of the interactive music CD-ROM ‘ShiftControl’.
ShiftControl won the first-ever BAFTA for interactive design and a MiliaD'Or in 1998.
During this period I also collaborated with choreographer Sarah Rubidge and composer Nye Parry on an interactive artwork called Passing Phases which was exhibited in the Queen Elizabeth Hall and at IDAT 99, Arizona.
Initial work on an (abandoned) doctorate in plasma physics simulating & visualising perturbations of magnetic fields. Publishing a personal page on the University's servers in HTML2.
Third year project investigating the possible heating effect of choronal magnetic field entanglement using Braid Theory and C.
Programs for the Acorn Archimedes A3000 published in Acorn User magazine. These were BASIC programs with high performance sections written in ARM RISC assembly language.