Tom Pickard

Developed a health and social care staff management platform that helps hospitals internally manage and grow their staff bank without needing third-party agencies.

I joined the company as their first employee and was tasked with helping to rebuild a bootstrapped application, made for demo purposes, from scratch. I worked closely with the CEO and CTO on architectural and business decisions. I also helped build a mobile and web application using React, React Native, RESTful APIs, Express.js, SDKs, and Firebase. The new application included a fresh look, sophisticated clash detection, and compliance lookups. After several months the company acquired its first client and was subsequently able to expand the team.

Rebuilt a mobile application for reporting cetaceans sightings off the west coast of Scotland. The application is offline capable and includes a casual sighting feature and excursions, which uses precise location tracking for users on boats and research vessels to report multiple sightings for a trip.

I was tasked with rebuilding a legacy app version in Ionic and Stencil.js along with adding some new features. The new version of the app is a lot faster and allows users to edit, update and delete their sightings. The app also has updated filtering, including complex scenarios and date ranges. It includes a new land-based survey feature with an inbuilt compass to calculate the user bearing from a sighting.

I was also tasked with building a new custom web based photo portal that allowed users to upload up to 100 high quality images of their sightings. The portal was built using Stencil.js, and authenticated users were generated from within the app using MagicLinks.

A rebuild of four separate legacy apps consolidated into a new single mobile application. The application was front-end only and included species and sites-list to help users identify species/locations when out on UK Moorland. Users were able to locally record sightings and create a watchlist of things they would like to see. I set up the project and worked closely with a designer in Figma to implement a custom, cross-platform UI/UX.

A citizen-science-focused mobile application for identifying and recording bird songs. I was tasked with adding some new features to the existing Ionic/Angular application. These included:

• A new timings fab that used the users' current location to determine the optimum times for them to record bird songs.
• 3-in-1 recordings where users could set their device down in one location for 30 minutes, and the app would take three recordings during that time period. This required updating a custom Capacitor plugin in both Swift and Java to accommodate storing multiple recordings.
• Species query; users viewing other users' recordings on the interactive map could query any species listed with the recording if they thought it to be incorrect or add any species they believed to be missing. This would flag the recording to admins, who could verify and update the record accordingly.
• Account stats that included total recordings, weekday vs. weekend recordings, and recordings in an urban vs. rural environment.
• Spanish translation; the app already included German and English support. I updated the translation service to read Spanish translations from a GoogleSheet and convert them to a local JSON file.