Tom Beckenham

Flow Wallet is a feature-rich, open-source browser extension providing a secure gateway to the Flow and EVM Web3 ecosystems.

As tech lead, I drove the project's technical strategy and execution. I spearheaded the modernization of the development lifecycle by establishing a full CI/CD pipeline with GitHub Actions and implementing a comprehensive testing pyramid from the ground up using Vitest and Playwright. This dramatically improved code quality and release velocity.

Architecturally, I led a major refactoring of the core KeyringService to significantly enhance security and data integrity. I also re-designed the application's data caching and state management systems, resulting in major performance gains and a more stable user experience. I successfully guided the team through multiple major version releases, delivering robust features for token/NFT management, dApp connectivity, and cross-chain functionality.

I started working on ideas for Comma Payments out of an interest I had for solving problems in billing and payments.

Through previous experience, I'd seen the process of billing and paying large amounts was incredibly antiquated. The name Comma came from the idea that we would solve problems for payments of any amount with a comma separator (in the UK and the US). i.e., anything over £1,000.

I built the first version of the product with my brother Nick who later pulled out of it during the pandemic. The back end ran on AWS Lamda functions and Dynamo, and the front end was React. Once we had a larger team, we found Lamba's an unnecessary complexity and moved back to Express and MongoDB.

Over the course of 2020, we realized the key was to target accounts payable and enable businesses to initiate payments in bulk. We targeted new Open Banking APIs and focused on an area no one had targeted - bulk payments.

We soon found out how complex it was to connect to banks, and in essence, we were developing a new payment rail. The project taught me a lot about complex integrations. During 2021 we raised funding and built a team of incredibly talented engineers (we contracted Toptal for a couple). I finally sold the business in March 2023.

This was a Ruby on Rails (RoR) application based on the main Specle codebase. The requirement was to develop a system that removed the need for teams of people at Condé Nast to verify and process advertising internally manually. The system would guide even inexperienced designers by creating high-quality print and interactive mobile advertising. It needed to connect to internal flat plan systems and integrate with Adobe Digital Publishing System. It also needed to connect to local proofing systems, which required us to install a Lightway server within their network that was managed securely through the primary RoR app. We worked with the head of production and the head of digital to reduce as many action steps as possible until we had automated receiving ads to minutes rather than days.

Orbiit was an AI community matching system that primarily connected together venture capital portfolio company founders and teams. I was responsible for developing the front end of the community tool.

I developed a Chrome extension that helped a venture capitalist collect and track data on prospective investments. The extension connected to an Airtable database which was the only back end for the project. The UI for the extension was dynamically created based on the fields in the Airtable database.