The online home of John Pollard

Brave Location Web Sites

If you want to get in touch, contact me directly at:

email: johnp@bravelocation.com
phone: +44 7968 968424

 

Below is the just a small selection of the websites I've worked on ...

Josie McCoy - Artist

Josie McCoy's website

I've been building and maintaining Josie's website for several years now. She's a very successful artist (a graduate of St. Martin's, now based in Valencia) and the site is a great showcase for her work.

Technology: Was built using ASP.Net, C#, XML and Bootstrap. Now static site generated using Jekyll

"John has been doing my website since 1999. He's professional, intelligent, patient and precise. I highly recommend working with him." - Josie McCoy

FindMyPast

British Newspaper Archive

FindMyPast are a leading genealogy website based in London that have multiple large-scale websites.

Brave Location were hired to design and develop a system that made it easier to extend free access to their British Newspaper Archive website for visitors inside the British Library (who are partners with FindMyPast on this project)

Technology: ASP.Net MVC, SQL Server, Nginx

Brave Location have delivered to the requirements, budget and timelines every time, following the FindMyPast engineering practices and standards to produce high quality solutions.

Sean Rodrigues
FindmyPast.com - Head of Engineering

Scalized

Scalized

Scalized are a business-to-business startup focusing on matching companies who are looking to expand into new international markets with appropriate professional contacts in that market.

Brave Location have worked closely with the Scalized team to design how their website works, to make it easily expand to their growing business needs.

I've also completed all the development on their application's website, implementing their matching and messaging system.

Technology: NodeJS, MongoDB, MySQL, AWS, MySQL, Express, Design


Working at Microsoft

I spent nearly 10 years working at Microsoft, both as a full-time employee and providing contract services through Brave Location. Below are a couple of the areas he worked in:

Bing Related Searches

Bing Screenshot

I was a developer (and lead) on the Bing Related Searches team on and off for several years. The work is mainly running data mining scripts over massive query logs to analyse user behaviour to generate related queries.

Technology: Mostly writing MapReduce scripts and code (using what's now called U-SQL plus C#), plus some machine learning and script automation.


Skype Home and Login Screen

Skype Screenshot

I worked for 6 months on the team who owned the Skype Login screens and Skype Home. This involved a lot of cross-platform Javascript - Skype uses the current client default browser for a lot of rendering - plus NodeJS on the backend.

Technology: NodeJS, cross-platform client-side JavaScript (Backbone)


You can see full details of the rest of my career on my LinkedIn profile