Curriculum vitaeTom Gould

Bright Sites makes software for newsrooms and publishers: Flow, a CMS, and Storycue, for content recommendations and planning. Its clients include The Independent, the Evening Standard, The Star and The Scotsman.

I lead development on Flow and Storycue: planning and estimating the work, leading the team and still writing code.

I joined as a senior back-end developer on The Independent and Evening Standard websites, about six weeks after they moved to a new platform. I mainly built new features and tuned the existing code, keeping the sites fast under heavy traffic on a news platform that changes all day, in a very agile team.

• I looked after the sites behind Turner’s TV channels on my own, including Cartoon Network, Boomerang, Cartoonito and Boing, a job a team of six permanent staff had done before.
• I built new features, maintained the sites, sped up their slow parts and ran the deployment schedule and process.
• I rebuilt the Cartoonito and Boing sites. Cartoonito was a complete rebuild: I imported all the content from the old site and worked closely with a designer so both sites looked and worked well on mobile devices.
• I reported to the channels’ product owners and the digital media technology supervisor, interviewed applicants, planned new builds and helped internal and external clients with work beyond the channel sites.

• I was the lead developer on the website’s projects, in a large agile team of mostly C# developers, product owners and business stakeholders. I estimated, planned, built, tested and reviewed the work, and represented the website in quarterly and sprint planning.
• I led the web development of PayLater, a new point-of-sale product.
• I prepared a new PHP site to replace the old .NET wonga.com, then extended it with new features, including an instalment loan to replace the original single-repayment loan.

• I was a back-end developer in a small team of three developers and two designers, looking after around 100 client sites.
• I talked to clients about what they needed, then planned, estimated and delivered new projects, and supported and maintained the existing ones.
• Most of the work was client management, planning and custom development.

• I joined on a three-month contract that lasted nearly three years.
• I programmed in classic ASP and ran the existing group of affiliate sites, and built new search-friendly sites to earn affiliate revenue.
• I handled every part of each site: planning, briefing the designers, finding and managing content, programming, deployment and hosting.
• Most of the work was consumer sites built around search engine optimisation, before Google’s Panda updates changed the rules.

I joined Summit Media in 2004, new to online media. There I found my interest in marketing and web strategy and started learning the skills I use today. I worked on the pay-per-click campaigns for Play.com and Gameplay.com, managed affiliates for Gifts.co.uk and worked on the SEO of sites Summit managed.