Profile

Cuckow Cuckow

Pez Cuckow

Lead Full Stack Web Developer

Name: Pez Cuckow
Address: Digital Nomad, Europe
Phone:

Hi, I'm Pez, a contracting lead full stack web developer and director of Peg Productions BV. I specialise in front-end work, but have experience in a wide variety of development stacks, building MVPs for small companies, SaaS development at scale, and web development consultancy.

My background and life outside of software engineering, allows me to take advantage of thinking from an engineering, business, or product perspective, and find a happy medium to help teams communicate effectively and deliver work that everyone is happy with.

I'm always interested in challenging & inspiring remote positions in smaller, usually remote first, companies.

In the front-end, I mainly develop in JavaScript (React/Ember), while on the back-end I work with Ruby on Rails, Node.js and occasionally PHP. However, I have experience in languages from Python, through C(++/#) to Bash.

As I work solely remotely, I spend my time travelling and, when I can, spending my weekends at Hackathons and other social events. I enjoy working in teams to build something new, while taking the opportunity to pick up exciting technologies and meet interesting people.

I contribute to open source, and maintain several open source projects, examples of which can all be found on my Github Profile, though the majority of my day to day work is in private repositories so won't be visible.

In my free time I enjoy trekking and camping. I spent the summer of 2012 volunteering for the Olympic Opening Ceremony in London as a performer in the Industrial Revolution section.

Employment

2013 - Current

Peg Productions BV

Lead Full Stack Web Developer

Developing MVP web applications using various development frameworks.

See the portfolio tab for examples of companies I've worked with recently.

2012 - 2013

Goldman Sachs, Inc

Technical Analyst in Asset Management

Worked with operations to run, update & support their trade management software.

Commended on technical aptitude, innovative thinking and client support skills.

Positions of Responsibility

2022 - Current

City of Leuven Social Groups

Founding Member and Admin

A community first group of over 1000 people, with regular events.

Founded and helped sculpt out the group, resolve conflict, help people host events.

2018 - Current

EMF Camp

Part of the Leadership Team

Electromagnetic Field is a non-profit UK camping festival for makers.

I am the logistics lead and part of the sponsorship team for the event.

2013 - 2015

Great Uni Hack

Founder of the GreatUniHack

Now in its tenth year, I worked as part of a committee to organise the Hackathon.

We coordinated sponsorship, programming challenges and the logistics of the event.

Achievements

2013 - 2015

Winner of BattleHack London

Full Stack Developer

As part of a team of four I attended PayPal's BattleHack in London yearly.

Placing second in 2014 and first in 2015, we attended their world final in San Francisco.

2010 - 2014

Bachelor of Science with First Class Honours

Computer Science with Business and Management

Received the Head of School award for outstanding contribution to the School of Computer Science.

2009 - 2011

Duke of Edinburgh Award (Gold)

Independent candidate working directly with DofE Wiltshire over 18 months

Included; expedition in the Brecon Beacons; volunteering with DofE Bronze candidates;

coordinating a residential with disadvantaged children & Ten Tors 45 mile endurance hike.

FlowForge
FlowForge is an open source SaaS platform, that allows organizations to reliably deliver Node-RED applications. As a core contributor to the project, I've helped to build out the platform, including the billing system, the deployment pipelines and the instance management, while advocating for best practices and up-skilling the team.
Details
  • Date 2022
  • Categories Web Development
  • Languages Node.js, Javascript
  • Technologies Vue.js, Node.js, Tailwind
View Live
Harvest Forecast
Forecast is the fast and simple way to schedule your team across projects. As part of the Forecast team, I implemented new features and functionality, advocated for best practices, usability & quality and kept the app up to date with the latest Ember API changes
Details
  • Date 2021
  • Categories Web Development
  • Languages Ruby, Javascript
  • Technologies Ruby on Rails, Ember, Stripe
View Live
Harvest
Harvest provides simple time tracking, online invoicing, and powerful reporting to help small businesses simplify employee timesheets and billing. Working with Harvest I've built out entirely new sections of the app, migrated existing sections to more modern technology, developed apps and a whole lot more!
Details
  • Date 2021
  • Categories Web Development
  • Languages Ruby, Javascript
  • Technologies Ruby on Rails, React, Node.js, Redis
View Live
ClickInsights
A platform that allows my clients customers to collect and collate one-click email responses from their customers. I developed the platform from an existing MVC, adapting it to be available to take on a larger number of users while fleshing out the functionality and setting up support for additional email services. Additionally I build the Stripe API intergration that allows for the customers to be charged on a tiered rate, depending on their usage of the platform.
Details
  • Date 2014
  • Categories Web Development
  • Languages PHP, Javascript
  • Technologies Laravel, MongoDB, Stripe
View Live
GroupVitals
A web and responsive mobile app that assists pastors and leaders of Churches in managing their congregation. I joined the small development team as a contractor for a period of six months and built out some of the core functionality as well as the Stripe powered billing system. Additionally I expanded the continuous integration to enable automated deploys, tests and evaluation of code quality.
Details
  • Date 2014
  • Categories Web Development
  • Languages PHP, Javascript
  • Technologies Laravel, MySQL, Stripe, Redis
View Live
GroupForms
While contracting for GroupVitals I helped add functionality to and release GroupForms, a lead generation product that provided a subset of GroupVitals functionality. In addition to small enhancements, I was responsible for the development and testing of the migration of GroupForms accounts to GroupVitals.
Details
  • Date 2014
  • Categories Web Development
  • Languages PHP, Javascript
  • Technologies CodeIgniter, MySQL
View Live
Dice.rs Live Chat
As freelance project for a private client, I built a custom web chat and added crypcocurrency casino functionality to his site. The chat itself powered by a Node.js server, which the clients connect to using WebSockets so the messages can be pushed to their browsers. It has admin functionality, supporting standard IRC functionality such as ban, kick and ipban and supports guest accounts. The user account sessions are linked directly to the websites login which is handled by PHP, so keep everything in sync.
Details
  • Date June 2014
  • Categories Web Development
  • Languages Node.js, Javascript
  • Technologies Socket.io
View Live
pegFinance
pegFinance was built for my final year project at University. The objective was to build a web application that could tell you how much money you would spend next month and what that money would be spent on. I built a system that parses bank statements extracting the key information, performs named entity resolution to map transactions to shops and then automatically categorises the transactions. Having done this the system is able to use machine learning techniques to predict the likelyhood that you will spend money at a particular shop in a given month and to make an estimate of how much would be spent. During evaluation on unseen test user data, the system was able to correcly predict how much would be spent, with an error margin of 13.7%
Details
  • Date 2014
  • Categories University, Web Development
  • Languages PHP, jQuery
  • Technologies MySQL, MatLab
View Live
This Site
I decided that my website needed an update following completion of my degree so set out to build something bespoke that was easy to change. The site itself is written using PHP, with Twig for the template parsing but all of the content is defined in YAML files. This makes the content particularly easy to update. When building the site I decided to optimise it's size as much as possible and if you check the source you'll find minification of the HTML, CSS and JavaScript as well as lazy loading techniques for the larger content. This in addition to the responsive design (try resizing the page!) help ensure the site is suited for mobile phones.
Details
  • Date 2014
  • Categories Web Design, Web Development
  • Languages Javascript, jQuery, PHP
  • Technologies YAML
Computer Science Project Report
"For my final year project I built a web application that can predict how much money a user will spent or receive next month, based on their historical spending patterns. As part of the project, I wrote a 15,000 word report on my application which outlines the motivation behind the project, the existing research in the area, the systems design and the implementation of that design before evaluating it's performance and suggesting future research."
Details
  • Date March 2014
  • Categories Report, University
  • Technologies LaTeX
View Source Download
Should the UK continue to block torrenting websites?
Final year business report written for University investigating the effect of torrenting on the UK media industry and the effectiveness of the blocking of torrenting websites.Abstract Torrenting is used to download copyrighted works from the Internet. This report gives an overview of the technology behind it, investigating its effect on the media industry. The consequences of introducing blocking measures is reviewed from support- ing and opposing evidence. In conclusion there are four suggestions for more specific research and legislation related specifically to the UK media industry.
Details
  • Date May 2014
  • Categories Report, University
  • Technologies LaTeX
View Source Download
Peg Productions
This website was built as a landing page for Peg Productions LLP and was used to gather business. The site itself was written completely in flash and responsive in nature, though as it used flash, was not mobile compatible, a responsive HTML/CSS alternative was built but is no longer available online.
Details
  • Date 2010
  • Categories Web Design, Web Development
  • Languages Flash, PHP

Get in touch

Hire me!

That's great, I would be glad to be of service! I can build you almost anything, from a simple one page website, a complex web application or even a website with a CMS to a bespoke Node.js application that allows you to use an Xbox controller to configure the lighting in your house.

If you fill out the contact boxes below with a brief summary of what you're looking for,I'll get back to you asap with a quote.

Alternatively you can directly!