Hi, I’m
Dave Barnwell

What I do

I build exceptional websites, web applications, and mobile apps for clients and web designers. My focus is on exceeding expectations through seamless collaboration and clear communication. I thrive in team environments where diverse skills are valued and organizational structures are agile, fostering innovation and efficient delivery.

I leverage cloud services like AWS, particularly serverless architectures, for optimal performance. However, I also possess extensive experience in managing and deploying *nix servers, offering flexibility to meet your project's specific needs.

My expertise spans a wide range of technologies, including (but not limited to) Laravel, Vue, React, Node.js, Go, and TypeScript. I'm proficient in using modern frameworks, APIs, and tools to bring your vision to life. (If you want to see a more complete technical skills list, drop me an email).

Why choose me?

As a full-stack developer, I'm committed to staying at the forefront of technological advancements, design principles, and business strategies. My understanding of how these elements intersect is key to delivering high-quality, impactful products.

While I primarily work as a freelance/contract developer within teams, I've also successfully built and managed engineering teams from the ground up, offering a valuable resource for projects needing that level of leadership.

See some recent work

• I partnered with the founder to build ActionStorm from the ground up, a petition and community engagement platform empowering activists to build thriving movements beyond signature collection. Features include rapid petition creation, active signer engagement, fundraising, AI-powered campaigns, and integrated data management (Mailchimp, NationBuilder, Action Network). We onboarded over 300,000 users in the first two years.
  Tech stack: Laravel Tailwind Filament Alpine.js Typescript Stripe OpenAI
• As Head of Tech at Pass Functional Skills, a UK EdTech platform for Maths and English, I oversaw developer recruitment, integrated AI marking and a RAG-powered virtual tutor, and developed public APIs and webhooks to enable seamless third-party integrations.
  Tech stack: Laravel Vue.js Typescript Bootstrap Nova Go OpenAI Chargebee
• As Head of Tech at Crowdfunder, the UK's leading rewards-based crowdfunding platform, I spearheaded significant scaling efforts to handle viral campaign traffic surges. This involved creating a public API for custom integrations, implementing substantial software and hardware speed optimizations, integrating multiple third-party payment providers, enabling "big data" analysis for data-driven decision-making, and expanding the development team from one to six members in two years.
  Tech stack: CodeIgniter Javascript Bootstrap Stripe Paypal Mangopay GoCardless
• SurfHog is a UK surf forecasting website providing real-time and historical surf conditions, wave buoy data, tide tables, pressure maps, and webcam feeds (primarily for Cornwall, with UK-wide wave buoy data). This project, over 20 years old and now in its third iteration, runs on a serverless architecture and provides visualisation of more than 30 million historical weather and sea condition data points.
  Tech Stack: Astro Typescript SolidJS Weather APIs Serverless

Contact me (see footer) if you'd like to know more about my backend work which has been extensive, auditing, building or supporting critical high-volume environments, such as auditing major UK Universities' backend application suites used by Staff and Students, Or working at Headforwards on Best Energy's global IoT platform ingesting billions of data points a month, to name two notable examples.

Life outside tech?

I'm an avid music lover, record collector, audiophile, relapsed trombone and piano player, devourer of books, lover of the outdoors.

Blog