Martin Burford

Introduction to me

I believe that Development is problem-solving first, coding second. To date, I've built in excess of 150 different websites over the past 25 years, and in that time I've worked in all manner of companies, ranging from media agencies, through to law firms, banks, SasS startups, publishing houses and many many more. Technically, there's not much that's come along that I haven't worked with. Things like data visualization, dynamic report generation, dashboards, widgets, mapping, heatmaps, live updating interfaces, animation libraries, component library builds, responsive web development, light and dark mode, multi-lingual sites, right-to-left rendering sites ... you name it, I've built it.

My most recent role

In my most recent role, I led all aspects of the front-end development of a project which required an existing Sharepoint instance (consisting of over 1,500 sites) to be completely re-skinned. Microsoft try so incredibly hard to get you to not do this. So, this project required a very delicate touch, to make sure that what was bespoke built wouldn't interfere with the bits of Sharepoint that were important to the business and needed to remain ... and there were MANY! To do this, I built a comprehensive set of React components, using Sass and TypeScript, which were then published as a component library to a privately scoped NPM package. This was then imported into Sharepoint, and via SPFX, was used to create custom Sharepoint Webparts, which were then fed data from the Sharepoint graph. This ultimately led to having a largely headless Sharepoint instance to play with, which was absolutely what the client had asked for ... and they weren't actually sure if it could technically be done. The project was a huge success, as it allowed what had become an ageing (Sharepoint) intranet from the past few years to be given a new lease of life.

The core tech-stack (although there were MANY more elements to the project) were:

Below is an illustration of some of the technologies I'm using at the moment, along with a few of the other technologies I've used in the past. This list is constantly growing, as the front-end landscape continues to change and evolve from one year to the next.