I am currently working on the edible urban website. Since it’s not complete I can’t share a link to the site, but I can show a screenshot of the work in progress.

The site features an interactive map of potential food growing spaces for selected cities.

The purpose of the interactive map is to collect data on land availability in cities; rooftops, tarmac, vacant lots, underused grass, land around housing for example. Most people think there isn’t any land available in cities to grow substantial food; this map aims to prove them wrong. In addition to mapping potential spaces, I have also begun to suggest a use for these spaces; for example, aquaponics, community gardens, beekeeping.

You can browse the map by the cities listed below. For these cities I have entered spatial data on land areas (rooftops, vacant land, Tarmac for example), as well as suggested uses for these areas such as community gardens, aquaponics, or commercial gardening. This spatial data on land areas is collected from digital sources (gmaps/ bing for example) and then checked on the ground with extensive walking. This is a long process, which explains the limited cities currently on this page, namely Peterborough and Newcastle in the UK, Hackney and croydon in London, and a selected part of Dallas.

Add your own data!

When browsing the map, you can contribute by adding your of local knowledge of land types, empty buildings, or public grassed spaces. This can be done once you are logged in, by using the polygon tool icon below. This lets you draw a shape on top of the map, around a building, grassed space or car park for example. This can be additional to cities already mapped or a new city. In this way we hope to crowd-source data about potential growing spaces in every city.

Fanbookz is a social network dedicated to football fans, there is news, chat, live updates, stats and a predictor game. The predictor game allows fans to predict the outcome of a upcoming match, they can predict a home win, away win, draw or they can predict an exact score. Live games get real time commentary and charts showing who has had possession, taken shots and made saves.

For more serious players Fanbookz wanted to develop an option to gamble for real money. The work I have done has been to build a predictor capable of this by adapting and adding to the existing predictor, the predictor is a html5/css3/javascript app with a php symphony back end. I worked exclusively on the front-end and by the end of the project had completely re-written the predictor code using a cut down version of the Riot.js library.

I then worked on the front-end tests which are written in gherkin running on behat/mink using selenium web driver, this means I am writing gherkin files and creating the underlying test context files in PHP.

From September to December 2014 I worked at Coelrind Ltd, Coelrind are leaders in online learning and assessment software. My job there was as a UX consultant and Front-end developer helping to shape the task flows and user interface design for XAMS their online assessment platform.

My responsibilities included:

• Information architecture, task analysis, interaction design, usability, prototyping for the UX side.
• Developing requirements, assessing technology/platform decisions, programming and testing for the Front End Developer side.

Their current technology stack is Microsoft IIS, C# with .Net controls, which is being replaced by Angular.js with Breeze.js data management library, As part of my role I developed prototypes of new interface components using Angular directives.

xams from James Cat on Vimeo.

This is a few minutes out of a video demo I gave looking at changes I thought were worth considering made by responding to feedback tests users gave to me, you can see I sometimes switch to the .Net version and back to the Angular one to highlight the changes

My strategy was to quickly develop prototypes and then demo them to the team, with a tight feedback loop of about a week we could quickly try out new interaction ideas without getting bogged down with paperwork and lengthy descriptions of interactions.