Hello, I’m Rhys.

I live in Kent with my wonderful wife Katie - a Kent-based wedding photographer – our sons Elliott and Timothy, and our cat Walter. When I find some spare time (not very often) I like hiking, bouldering and live music.

Professionally, I’m a Senior Software Engineer at The Guardian. Mostly this website is written from that perspective. I work on full stack projects incorporating frontend (usually Typescript/JavaScript & React), backend (usually Scala) and infrastructure work (mostly in AWS).

I’ve worked on a few teams at the Guardian, currently I work in the Ophan team, developing The Guardian’s in-house pageview analytics platform. Recently I’ve worked on projects like:

  • Leading development on a data pipeline, pulling suspected bot pageviews from BigQuery and amending pageview documents in our Elasticsearch cluster
  • Pulling social media data into Ophan and adding new dashboards to view it alongside our pageview data
  • Enhancing pages that give staff access to long term historical pageview data

Before that, I spent a few years in the Editorial Tools team, l worked on projects like:

  • Leading development on new a system across our CMS and content API to support new rich-media structured article formats like Timelines
  • Creating a new spellchecker for The Guardian’s ProseMirror-based CMS
  • Migrating text fields across the Tools estate to ProseMirror