Martin Burford
Front-End Developer
Curriculum Vitae
I started coding professionally in 1999, and have a deep passion for beautifully crafted web interfaces. My approach to work is always the same. I am driven by working with nice, smart people. I’m incredibly passionate about how the mechanics and visuals of a website work together in harmony, resulting in a stunning user experience. Yes, I code HTML, JavaScript (ES6), Node, React, SASS, TypeScript etc in every contract, but my true passion is in building the very best UI a website can have, with whatever technologies are required to do the job. Couple this with an obsessive side to my personality where I continually strive for the cleanest, most extendable and robust code possible. I work hard to ensure I only ever leave companies with code that I myself would be happy to inherit. If you wish to discuss potential contract roles with me, then please do get in touch:
- My personal email address is martin@martinburford.co.uk
Currently coding with (as of August 2026)
Other coding experience
- .net Core
- AG Grid
- AM charts
- Ant Design
- Apollo
- Async / Await
- Axios
- Azure Devops
- Babel
- BEM
- Bootstrap
- Browserify
- Chai
- Chromatic
- Contentful
- Cypress
- Drupal
- Enzyme
- ES6
- Escenic
- Express JS
- Fetch
- Flexbox
- Github
- Google Maps
- Grunt
- Gulp
- Heatmaps
- Icomoon
- Jade
- Jasmine
- Jest
- JQuery
- Karma
- Kendo
- Less
- Lo-dash
- Lottie JS
- Mermaid JS
- Mocha
- Next Auth
- NPM
- Phantom JS
- PHP
- Post CSS
- Pug
- Puppeteer
- Pusher JS
- Redux Toolkit
- Rollup
- Sharepoint
- Sinon
- Snapshot testing
- SPFX
- Styled components
- Styleguidist
- Tanstack
- Vercel
- Webpack
- Websockets
- Yarn
Recent training courses taken
Whenever a role has required training prior to me starting, I have always enrolled on courses, so that I'm the very best I can be from my first day of work.
| Description | Completed | Url |
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Lead React Developer
Frieze
- September 2025 - June 2026
- London, UK
Role overview
- Frieze called me up and asked me to return to lead the front-end development of the project that I created throughout 2024 and early 2025. With increasing levels of work and an ongoing expansion to their business, they wanted a trusted pair of hands to spearhead extending the existing platform.
- Starting at the same time as me was a new Designer who significantly changed the look and feel of the product. My role was therefore to implement these changes within an already well established front-end codebase.
- Accessibility, performance and responsiveness were at the core of all work that I did, since Frieze have multiple client-facing websites, serving millions of users worldwide.
- The existing component library was extended, in terms of existing components being updated, along with a whole host of new components being written., using React, TypeScript and Sass.
- One of the larger pieces of work was to add in multi-lingual support, with that working via static JSON files along with providers that consumed data from a Drupal back-end.
Technologies used
Code samples
Examples of code are available to view for this role. All code provided was 100% written by myself with no other Developers involved.
Lead React Developer
RiskBase
- April 2025 - July 2025
- London, UK
Role overview
- RiskBase hired me for 3 months, to help setup and start the re-development of their Engage platform.
- I worked single handedly, creating a fully responsive Next.js, React, TypeScript, Tailwind project.
- The UI was a complex data capture site, requiring extensive react-hook-form integration.
- Additionally, TanStack Query was used for all API data consumption and mutation logic.
- A large number of elements of the project were written as feature toggles, controllable by environment variables. Two examples of this were mock data (pre-population) techniques and React guard logic.
Technologies used
Lead React Developer
Frieze
- April 2024 - April 2025
- London, UK
Role overview
- I was hired to lead the re-architecture and subsequent re-building of the front-end of 3x Frieze sites.
- Due to the nature of shared (along with site-specific) components, Turborepo was the perfect tool for the job.
- An extremely comprehensive component library was created, consisting of around 100 React / TypeScript / Sass front-end components.
- The front-end pulled data from 3x unique Drupal instances, in order to allow a fully headless set of websites to be created.
- The websites were built in such a way whereby components, scripts, styles along with general configuration could be globally shared, along with local overrides wherever required.
- The sites were also coded to work with i18n, as 1x of the 3x sites had to support multi-lingual translations.
Technologies used
Code samples
Examples of code are available to view for this role. All code provided was 100% written by myself with no other Developers involved.
Recommendations
Martin is, without a doubt, one of the most talented developers I’ve had the pleasure of working with. His depth of knowledge and experience was absolutely invaluable - the project wouldn’t have succeeded without his contributions. Martin brought a huge number of ideas, not just about how to approach problems, but just as importantly, how not to. His attention to detail and drive for perfection were exemplary. I learned a lot from working with him and hope to have the opportunity to work with him again in the future.
- Show all 3 recommendations received
Lead React Developer
Alex Howard Group
- July 2024 - September 2024
- London, UK
Role overview
- Alex Howard were wanting to bring the development of their suite of websites in-house, having out-sourced the work for the past few years.
- The long-term wishes of the business were to have permanent team members to work on this.
- I however had a past working relationship with one of the members of the leadership team, and was asked to build the foundations of a project re-platform whilst the permanent hires were sourced.
- I therefore spent 3 full months (albeit on a part-time basis) working on building a completely new front-end design system, with extensive documentation for the (yet to be hired) team members.
- As part of this work, a comprehensive mechanism was built to support light and dark modes across all sites in the Alex Howard group.
Technologies used
Code samples
Examples of code are available to view for this role. All code provided was 100% written by myself with no other Developers involved.
Recommendations
Martin is one of those rare developers who know and love their craft and is very, very good at it. He built us a front-end framework (from scratch) that is truly mobile friendly, incredibly performant, adaptable, and which will take us in to the next stages of our growth and beyond. One of the best developers I’ve worked with in 25 years. He also happens to be easy to work with and can lead a team with grace and ease. If you get a chance to hire Martin, you should hire Martin.
Other roles
Besides my most recent 4 roles (as above), I have worked in many other companies, on a contract basis more recently, but also in permanent positions at the start of my career:
| Type | Company | Role | From | To | Url |
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Higher Education
BSc Hons (2:1) in Internet Technology - Staffordshire University, September 1997 - June 2001