Building
The engineering
I came to engineering sideways. I wanted a platform for readers and writers, and nobody was going to build it for me — so I learned to build it myself, working with AI, which turns out to be a discipline of its own rather than a shortcut past one. Everything below was written that way, prompt by prompt, from an iPad. Websites and mobile apps, in production, with real readers on them.
Calvary Scribblings
An editorial platform for a new generation of writers
A full publishing platform built on Next.js, Firebase and Cloudflare. Contributors submit, editors schedule, and stories go out on a fixed weekly cadence through a custom CMS — no WordPress, no off-the-shelf anything. Underneath it sits a rewards economy, a nightly social room, a reading competition with a live leaderboard, and a reader that works with no signal at all. The typography is hand-set to a house style: Cormorant Garamond, drop caps, gold subheadings, covers generated to a fixed typographic frame. It runs as a static export, so a story page arrives already written.
calvaryscribblings.co.uk
Story Island
The platform in your pocket, reading offline
The native half of Calvary Scribblings, built in React Native and Expo against the same backend. It ships an EPUB reader that works entirely offline — bookmarks, search, definitions, position sync across devices — plus a storefront, a library shelf and a social room. The hard problems were the invisible ones: a persisted session that looks signed-out for ten seconds, a book’s back cover blurring because two 3D transforms were nested and each one resampled the type. Live on iOS and Android.
The Calvary Scribblings Book Store
A bookshop for several publishers at once
A storefront carrying titles from multiple independent publishers alongside our own, with Stripe and Paystack running side by side so a reader in Lagos and a reader in London each pay in a currency that makes sense to them. Purchases become entitlements rather than downloads, territories are enforced per title, and every book has a free sample bounded to its first chapter. Each title is typeset into the house edition — title page, copyright page, colophon — so a shelf of eleven books from one publisher and four from another still reads as one shop.
Pappyshow Films
A rebuild for a London production company
My first client project. Pappyshow had a Wix site with a real design language worth keeping, so the brief was a better version of what they already had rather than something new: a live showreel hero, a deck of films where each one holds the screen while the next slides over it, and case-study pages for all nine titles. Static Next.js on Cloudflare, with every image migrated off Wix into Firebase Storage before their plan lapsed — 83 images, nine hundred-odd derivatives, homepage weight down from 1.86MB to 0.63MB on mobile.
pappy.show
Linea House Publishing
A publication platform for an independent house
A website for the publisher bringing eleven titles to our Book Store — a catalogue that treats each book as an object worth looking at, with preorder built in rather than bolted on. The house’s own mark is made of lines, which set the direction: hairlines, generous space, and nothing that competes with a cover.
lineahousepublishing.com
