Hands‑on engineering leadership for complex digital transformation programmes. I help product and engineering teams turn fragile legacy web estates into robust platforms that are faster and easier to maintain, scale, govern, and improve.
I am an enthusiastic senior software engineer and technical leader with over twenty‑three years of hands‑on experience.
I help teams and clients design, build and improve websites, applications and web platforms, pairing architecture, delivery judgement and hands‑on TypeScript, React, HTML, and CSS. I also founded Kavanagh Digital, where I lead independent programme assurance, recovery, and web‑platform due diligence.
My portfolio is diverse; I work with global clients, solving real-world problems, including:
Senior software engineer on the UK and Ireland replatform, migrating Nando’s customer‑facing websites from legacy Drupal to a unified headless platform built with Next.js and Storyblok, with a focus on performance, accessibility, and SEO.
Lead front‑end developer within Selfridges' e‑commerce Customer Experience team, delivering new features, considerable refactoring, and platform performance improvements.
Principal engineer leading AI‑driven browser tooling within Microsoft Edge DevTools, including real‑time content simplification, integrated issue reporting, and developer feedback pipelines.
Principal‑level support inside active delivery when architecture, standards, mentoring, documentation, ownership transfer, and implementation decisions need strengthening whilst the team keeps shipping.
Senior technical direction for organisations that need CTO‑style judgement across roadmap, suppliers, architecture, and release risk before a permanent leadership hire makes sense.
Define Next.js platform boundaries when domains, routes, tenants, brands, content ownership, data ownership, deployment models, or team responsibilities are making change unsafe.
Headless architecture advice before CMS, content model, preview, revalidation, metadata, schema, media, localisation, and editorial ownership decisions become expensive to reverse.
Senior platform assessment and technical direction for React and Next.js estates where routing, CMS, deployment, SEO, ownership, and delivery risk have become one problem.
Route‑level performance work for modern front ends where field data, Core Web Vitals, scripts, fonts, images, data loading, or templates are weakening important user journeys.
Measure GEO with honest evidence from Search Console, analytics, query sets, AI‑assisted journeys, attribution patterns, and outcomes instead of fake scores.
Reduce headless CMS image bandwidth and quota risk with a storage mirror: sync changed assets, reuse originals, and keep Next.js image delivery off your CMS.
Lessons from running Next.js Pages Router at scale in 2026, including governance, performance discipline, and why older patterns sometimes still make sense.
How to de‑risk a CMS migration before the real move starts, by testing workflows, content assumptions, integrations, ownership, and technical contracts early.
A practical framework for choosing rewrite, refactor, or strangler paths, based on risk, delivery pressure, change cost, and organisational appetite.
Retention theatre explained through surveys, recognition schemes, pay, autonomy, trust, workload, management quality, and why strong engineers still leave.
Why transformation programmes fail after the slide deck, covering ownership, governance, operating‑model change, vendor fragmentation, and delivery reality.
Structure technical AEO content for direct answers without FAQ spam, using extractable passages, visible text, schema discipline, and topic depth.
Build an LRU cache in TypeScript with a hash map and doubly linked list, then compare it with a simpler JavaScript Map implementation and O(1) operations.
My view on product engineers and software engineers: how the remit differs, why organisational support matters, and what we need to learn after release.
How to make content easier for generative engines to trust, with clearer claims, stronger authorship, better sourcing, and structure that reduces ambiguity.
Consultancies can unblock stalled programmes, but without ownership transfer and internal capability growth, rescue work becomes recurring dependency.
