---
id: history-engagements
area: history
level: 2
title: "Fifteen years of delivery for agencies and their clients"
claim: "Twenty-two agencies and twenty-three brands · national campaigns · bank and broadcaster platforms · betting front-ends · and a habit of being called in to rescue work someone else could not finish."
confidence: historic
period: "1999–2014"
tech: [ActionScript, PHP, JavaScript, MySQL, XML, SOAP, React, Python]
metrics: [{label: "agencies on the client wall", value: 22}, {label: "brands delivered for", value: 23}, {label: "code exhibits kept", value: 6}]
artefacts: [{type: doc, label: "The client wall", url: "content/history/l3/history-client-wall.md"}, {type: doc, label: "Six code exhibits across five eras", url: "content/history/l3/history-code-exhibits.md"}]
public: true
last_verified: 2026-10-26
tags: [history, agencies, brands, exhibits]
---

**Capability statement.** Range under deadline. The work in this period ran from car classifieds and online betting to a bank's pitch piece, a broadcaster's on-demand banners and a publisher's education platform — usually with a date attached that could not move.

## The eras, briefly

**1999–2002 — the start.** Web design and development for a high-volume car marketplace, then freelance work building sites, applications, interfaces and database back ends for small agencies.

**2002–2005 — London, full time.** Online gaming: lead front-end developer on a synchronous multi-game platform handling a thousand simultaneous clients, integrating against Java back ends and XML sockets. Then the emerging interactive advertising industry, where a creative front end with a technical spine was scarce.

**2006–2009 — the agency run.** The bulk of the client wall: bank pitch work delivered in weeks, broadcaster promotions, a global oil company's re-brand site, premium drinks campaigns, a news organisation's media presentation layer, a publisher's education platform, and a global computer-aided design vendor's localised site. Several of these were rescues — brought in on a short deadline to rewrite work another team could not land.

**2009–2012 — product and campaign.** A standalone encrypted presentation builder with its own media library and remote update path. A national beer campaign with video submissions, cross-brand promotion, in-store mechanics and authorisation over SOAP. Interactive launches with 3D content in the browser.

**2012–2014 — small products for small business.** Online book building, a reactive design system, and art applications for a motion-sensing controller, transitioned toward mobile.

**2014–2020 — the workshop years.** The site builder and the signage product (see [Products](../products/products-business.md)), which is where the work moved from delivering campaigns for other people's brands to owning software and supporting customers.

## Languages across the eras

The point of the exhibit set is that the tooling changed repeatedly and the delivery discipline did not: ActionScript 3 with class-based architecture, hand-written JavaScript engines, PHP media pipelines, TypeScript with typed service layers and a relational schema, embedded C++ for firmware, and now declarative infrastructure as its own kind of code.

## Evidence

| Claim | Evidence | Artefact |
|---|---|---|
| Twenty-two agencies and twenty-three brands | The client wall, carried from the résumé and the recovered site content | [Client wall](l3/history-client-wall.md) |
| Work across six technology eras | Six exhibits from OO ActionScript to a hand-written Nix package | [Code exhibits](l3/history-code-exhibits.md) |
| Rescue work under immovable deadlines | Multiple engagements recorded as rewrites of stalled projects | [Client wall](l3/history-client-wall.md) |
| Sponsorship of the later product era | 2014–2020 product work described in the résumé | [Products](../products/products-business.md) |

## Trade-offs and limits

- **Historic work is labelled historic.** Nothing in this section is presented as current capability; where a technique is still used today, the page links to where it is used.
- **One engagement has no screenshot.** The national archive work was an internal tool. It is described and not illustrated, because there is nothing legitimately publishable to show.
- **No client has been named beyond a brand.** Brands are named because they were public campaigns. Individuals, internal contacts and unpublished commercial detail are excluded.
- **The exhibits are excerpts.** Around forty lines each, chosen to show judgement — structure, error handling, an exit plan — not to demonstrate volume.

This work is finished, and it is presented in the past tense throughout.